"... we
suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see
directly, but mediately,
and that we have no means of correcting these colored and
distorting lenses
which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps
these subject
lenses have a creative power..."
-- from "Experience" in Emerson's Essays
"...sensible
people will get through life by rule of thumb as they may
interpret it ... Take
any fact, and reason upon it to the bitter end, and it will ere
long lead to
this as the only refuge from some palpable folly."
-- from The Way of All Flesh by Samuel
Butler
"The soul is a prism
That casts rainbows
From heaven"
--from Skeleton Key by Rex Sexton
Epigraphs
Foreword
Part 1: Big Questions
Getting
Personal
Creation
Story for the
21st Century
One
Beautiful Moment
Where
There's a Will
Listening
to Life with
a Tin Ear
Highly
Unlikely
The
Abraham Effect:
The Future of Humanity Depends on You
Our Time
Pep Talk
to Myself as I
Get Older and Time Goes Faster
Time
Dilation
Never-Ending
Now
The Time
Between Time
Is
Reality
Discontinuous?
Moving
Beyond the
Limitations of Science
An
Ultimate Unit of Space
and the Need for a New Calculus
Does Dark
Matter?
Does
Light Matter?
Defining
Action
The
End-Game Generation
Seeks Meaning
The
Stages of Man
Truth and
Consequences
Scared to
Life
Death as
Moving from One
Room to Another
Why Do
You Pray?
Part 2: Identity, Memory, and Communication
Names and
Naming
Language:
Anarchy,
Dialogue, and Understanding
Memory
Clusters:
Trying ot rEscue the Past
Memory
and Sex
Random
Thoughts about
Thought
Anti-Reason
Coping
with a Brain
that Changes Over Time
Context,
Meaning, and
Language
Connecting
Without
Words
Your
Signature and
Your Unique Identity
Odor and
Identity,
Perfume as Infidelity Training, I Stink Therefore I am
The
Nostalgia of Tomorrowland
Philosophic
Insight
from the Blind
William
James and Laura
Bridgman
Multiplicity
of Animal
Languages
Part 3: Understanding the World We Live In
In the
Beginning Was
the Need to Eat and Drink
Evolutionary
Quirks
The
Future of War
Is
Entropy and Illusion?
Maui
The Niche
Theory of
Evolution
Slavery
and Industrialization
The Day
After the Day
After Tomorrow
How to
Save the
Bahamas and Maybe the World as Well
Why
Didn't God Make
Little Green Mammals?
Did Large
Dinosaurs
Have Two Brains?
Gaia
Alternate
'War of the
Worlds' Plots
Worm
Promised
Land
Part 4: Politics and Government
How to
Fix Congress?
Eliminate Seniority
How to
Fix Congress?
Limit the Powers of Leaders
Long-overdue
Constitutional
Amendment
The Role
of Vice
President
Delay,
Rumination, and
Compromise in Government
A PRISM
Solution
Message
to Hong Kong Protesters
- Rolling Boycott
Tax
Credits for National
SErvice?
Selling
Money − An
Alternative to Taxes
Make It
Easy to Make
Charitable Contributions at Tax Time
Certification
for
Panhandlers
"Cultural
Citizenship"
− an Alternatie Form of Goverment Made Possible by the Internet
How to
Deal with Dictators
How to
Make the US
Postal Service Competitive
Longevity
and
Governance
Part 5: Literature, Reading, and Writing
Why I
Write
Contractions
Aphorisms
about Writing
and Rewriting
Recurring
Themes
Advice to
a Memoirist
Why Do We
Read/Write/Watch
Stories?
Binge
Reading Shakespeare
In
Just-Spring and
Hemingway
Today's
Youth and Reading
The
Western Canon of
Literature
Reading
and the Zerg
When
Story Matters More
Than FAct
The
Mothers of Fact
Reinterpreting
Greek
Myth
Literary
Periods and
Man's Changing Image of Himself
Part 6: The Double-Edged Impact of Technology
The
Importance of
Taking the Easier Path
The Curse
of Moore's Law
Thoughts
on the
Significance of Ebooks
The
Internet and the
Human Spirit
Part 7: History
Yes-terday
The Myth
of Future Shock
Trigonometry
and
American Independence
The Rise,
Progress and
Termination of the American Revolution
Taking a
Fresh Look at
Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization
The
History of
Herodotus
The
Slavery that Was
Rome in Plautus, Terence, and Petronius
World War
II Legacy
Movable
Sails Could
Have Changed the Course of History
What the
Hebrew Alphabet
Tells Us
Predictable
and Disastrous
Belief in Magic
Timeless
Scams
Part 8: Business and Product Ideas
Million-Dollar
Opportunities
How to
Facilitate Car
Recalls
Print
Obituaries in Large
Type
Advice
for Rental Car
Comanies
Outdated
School
Reunions
Customer
Service 101
Pain
Simulator
Grandmother
Bear
Do-It
Yourself
Alphabet Book
Independent
Agencies
for Bank Business?
Engineering
Question −
Windmills and Walls
How to
Cope with Reduced
Weight on the Moon
Cigarettes
− Why Not
Put a Filer on the Other End?
Why Not
Save a Hair?
Intelligence
Test
Wishlist
Pay Pill
Titty Top
Part 9: Everyday Life − How to Live, How to Cope
Exemplary
People: the Machinist
and the Postal Clerk
Creative
Procrastination
Free-Style
Time Management:
Done List Instead of To-Do List
How to
Expand Time
The
Energy Cycle
Tangible
Goods vs. Experience
How to
Fight
Procrastination
The "lenses" in this book are
essays that look at knotty questions from unusual angles. They
are my way of
trying to ponder imponderables.
I need to know who I am and why I am
and how my life might matter in the context of those who came
before and those who
will come after. But the answers offered by religion feel
insufficient, and scientific
knowledge has advanced to the point that it is beyond the
understanding of laymen.
It would be wonderful to participate in the vast endeavor of
scientific
discovery and make a contribution, but the advancement of
science will not end
in my lifetime and will probably never end. I need answers that
make sense here
and now.
Many of these lenses derive from my belief
that, as
individuals
and as a species, self-regulating mechanisms push us toward
balance and reason
and compassion. Our worst experiences and dreams can help
nudge us in the right
direction as if some force were trying to navigate a huge
ship down a river,
with the crudest of controls − a push this way, then a push
that way. Toward
what goal?
Sometimes
inspiration isn't a matter of stimulating new ideas, so much
as confirming and clarifying
thoughts considered earlier. In my eclectic reading, I
sometimes stumble on a passage
that feels right, not as a discovery of something new, but
rather as a clear
and cogent expression of what I believed before, and that
stimulates me to take
that thought in a new direction.
Such was the case with a
passage from Boethius,
who wrote in the sixth century. In prison, awaiting execution
at the random whim
of King Theodoric of Italy, Boethius tried to make sense of
life. He concluded that
infinity, eternity, and chance reduce everything we might do
to insignificance.
The
endeavor to try to understand the nature of everything is
unending. That is just
another aspect of infinity/eternity — no single breakthrough,
no individual
contribution matters in the long run, because the process of
discovery never
ends. There's never a moment when the answer is found. Every
answer gives rise
to new questions, which lead to new insights.
Yes, part of why we exist,
presuming there
is a why, must be to participate in trying to make the
world a better place
than we found it, in trying to advance knowledge, or in trying
to help those
who might someday do so.
But
another important role, one which becomes all the more
important the older we get,
is striving to make personal sense of the world we live in and
our role in it. I
will never understand the absolute nature of anything, but I
can arrive at a
personal understanding — building context through reading and
experience,
making personal mind maps to help me recognize relationships
and interconnections,
arriving at personal answers to the big questions, answers
that help me deal
with day-to-day reality and to arrive at a sense of
fulfillment, so that the ordinary
tasks and challenges of life make sense to me in a self-built
context.
From
this personal perspective, infinity and eternity are positive,
not negative.
Every moment in time is in the middle of all time, just as
every point in space
is in the middle of all of space.
I,
just like everyone who has ever lived, stand at the center of
the universe. So
I strive to find truth and meaning within the fabric and
context of my life.
In
practical terms, this means that I need not read and strive to
understand everything
written by great thinkers. Rather I read authors whose works
resonate with me,
whose thoughts stimulate follow-on thoughts of my own.
I'm
on a personal quest to try to understand what matters to me as
an individual,
living here and now.
(From an email to my
granddaughter Adela)
Other
people know physics and biology much better than I do. This is
what I
understand from what I've read and heard and figured out from
trying to make
sense of all the pieces. This is what I think about how the
universe came to be
and where we fit in the overall scheme of things.
Imagine you have a huge
bubble ring and lots
of soapy water and all the time imaginable to blow bubbles.
Most
of your bubbles pop right away before they are fully formed.
Lots come out
small and pop soon. And a few get big and drift away and are
beautiful.
You
keep blowing bubbles for years, for billions of years and you
can keep blowing
them for billions of years in the future. You're an absolutely
amazing bubble blower.
Now
imagine that instead of bubbles of soap, you are making
bubbles of space-time,
the stuff that makes the existence of all stuff possible. And one of
your bubbles is a grand-prize
winner. It keeps getting bigger and bigger. All the conditions
are right this
time. When you blow billions and billions of bubbles even
something
ridiculously unlikely will happen sooner or later — in all of
eternity a once-in-a-million
shot will happen many times.
This
bubble lasts for 14 billion years and keeps expanding and
might continue for
billions of years to come. That bubble becomes the whole
universe.
On
the surface of that bubble, there form galaxies and stars and
planets, billions
and billions of them. And on one of those planets, life forms
and evolves over
three and a half billion years, from one-cell creatures to
dogs and cats and
monkeys and people.
Imagine
that everything and everyone in this universe is connected to
everyone and everything
else. We're all on that same ever-expanding bubble, and we're
connected by
forces like gravity, and we're connected by history as well.
When
our big bubble started, all that existed were the simplest of
atoms and
molecules and particles. Over time, these little pieces of
matter randomly came
together by the push and pull of forces like electricity and
gravity and formed
stars. And the stars became so dense and so hot that new kinds
of atoms and
molecules formed inside them. And some of those stars got so
big that they exploded
as "super
novas". And in those explosions new more complex
atoms and molecules
were created — kinds of matter that are essential to life as
we know it were
formed in the explosion of stars.
In
other words, the matter that makes up your body was created in
the explosion of
stars.
You might say that stars
died that life as we
know it could exist.
Space
and time are vast, and we seem small and insignificant next to
all that vastness.
On the other hand, it took
all that vastness
of time and space for us to come into existence, for us to be
who we are here
and now.
In
other words, the bigger the universe, the more important we
are, because it took
all of that to make us.
Then
the question becomes — what should we do about it?
If
we're all that important, what should we do with our lives,
with our effort and
our thinking and our working together and our caring for and
about one another
to make the creation and evolution of the universe worth the
effort?
God
imagined one fleeting moment − a butterfly fluttering above a
pond at sunset. And
He created the universe − all the past and all the future − to
make that moment
happen.
Any moment, in all its
detail, would require
the miracle of all of creation.
The creation of any being
would require all of
creation.
Perhaps there was no
beginning and will be
no end, and every moment we witness the miraculous creation of
everything and
everyone.
We equate consciousness with
rational thought and we can correlate thought with brain
activity. And when
there is no brain activity and hence, presumably, no
thought, we define a
person as dead − brain dead.
But we can act without thinking, and
we can think one thing, make a conscious decision to do it,
but do something else,
even the opposite, surprising ourselves. In other words, the
will, though
associated with thought and a subject of thought, is
separate from it.
Is the brain necessarily the seat of
the will?
Language associates will with
emotion and intuition and suggests. Language suggests that
the will is centered
somewhere other than the brain, for instance the heart or
gut. Language also associates
will with the vague, but persistent, concepts of "soul,
"self," "spirit,"
and "life force."
Does the will necessarily cease at
the same time that thought does? Might someone who is
declared brain dead still
have will, including the will to live?
Also, linguistically as well as in
religion and myth, the soul or spirit is separate from the
body and persists
even when the body dies. So why presume that
soul/self/spirit/will has a distinct
physical location in the body, as thought does?
Thanks to my
friend Dave Lupher for remembering this related quote:
"Your second paragraph reminds
me of Paul: "I do not understand my own actions. For I
do not do what I
want, but I do the very thing I hate." Roman 7:15. There
were anticipations
of this in Euripides and Ovid."
I
used to envy those born with perfect pitch. Unlike me, they
could appreciate
music to its fullest. I couldn't tell if a piano was out of
tune or distinguish
great from mediocre performances. But now I've reached an age
when instead of
regretting my limitations, I can be proud of them.
Perfect pitch is a curse
and a tin ear a
blessing. To someone with perfect pitch anything less than a
perfect performance
is painful to listen to. Yes, such a person can appreciate
subtleties beyond my
ken, but that same person might not appreciate and enjoy the
vast majority of what
passes for music for the rest of us.
I
can appreciate a flawed performance on a piano that is out of
tune. I can enjoy
sing-alongs and amateur singing and karaoke and informal
musical events. I can
delight in whistling while I walk. My opportunities for
musical pleasure are far
greater because of my tin ears.
Similarly, I can appreciate
and savor ideas
that aren't thoroughly developed. I can enjoy a story, a book,
a movie that is
good but not great. I have everyday, non-professional
expectations.
The world is far too
complex to understand
in detail. And I'd rather explore many subjects and try to
arrive at a practical
working understanding of many than devote myself to one narrow
field and never
arrive at certainty or complete knowledge of it.
Rather
than seeking definitive answers to the "big questions", I want
to arrive
at personal answers − answers that make sense on the scale of
where and when I
live, rather than the vastness of infinity and eternity. I
need lenses that
help me look at the world with a perspective of immediacy,
from the context of
daily life.
Let's
enjoy what we can know. Let's enjoy life as best we can,
glorying in the
imperfection of our tin ears.
Chains of events that influenced my
life and led me to become who I am were highly unlikely - one
coincidence
happening after another. If any event in the chain had not
unfolded just the
way it did, everything would have turned out differently.
If you ever fell in love, think
about the events leading up to that moment. After the fact, the
events feel
inevitable. It is difficult to imagine how your life could have
gone if those events
had not occurred when and how they did. All the pieces fell into
place miraculously.
The apparent likeliness of events
depends on your perspective when recalling them. You know all
the details related
to coincidences that have affected the course of your own life.
And the more you
know about an event, the more unique it seems to you. Those same
events when
seen by someone else and considered separately, rather than in
sequence, are
subject to the laws of probability and seem ordinary and
expected.
Every time you toss a coin, the
probability of heads is 50%, regardless of the results of
previous tosses. But
a long chain of events such as heads, heads, tails, heads,
tails, tails,
tails... defies analysis. Only when you isolate a variable and
simplify the context
with a generalized perspective do the laws of probability apply.
According to Bernoulli's Law, one of
the basic principles of probability, it is possible to predict
with great accuracy
the average outcome of many similar events, but it is impossible
to predict, with
certainty, any single event.
In other words, the more you know
about a specific event and the chain of circumstances that led
to it, the more
unique and miraculous that event appears.
Known in detail, all events are highly
unlikely, the result of multiple chains of coincidence.
Every moment of every life is unique
and miraculous.
Just as the entire Jewish people are
descended from Abraham, the people who inhabit Earth a thousand
years from now
may all be descended from you.
You have two parents, four grandparents,
eight great-grandparents. The number of your ancestors doubles
with every
generation. Counting backwards 1000 years, about 36 generations
ago, you had about
69 billion ancestors, which is that's 2 to the power of 36. But
at that time,
there were only about 50 million people alive in Europe, meaning
that distant
cousins mated with one another.
There were people alive in Europe a
thousand years ago who were the ancestors of everyone of
European descent who
is alive today. In other words, everyone of European
descent alive today
is a cousin of everyone else, and probably in multiple ways due
to distant
cousins marrying, often without knowing they were cousings.
Fast forward a thousand years, taking
into account that people are much more mobile today than they
were a thousand
years ago. In the year 3000, every human being alive on Earth,
if the human
race survives that long, will be a descendant of people who are
alive today; and
if you are a parent, there's a chance that everyone alive a
thousand years from
now will have genes that passed through you.
That is an awesome responsibility.
Be careful. Be proud. The future humanity race
depends on you.
We perceive time very differently
than machines record it. Would it be an advance in artificial
intelligence if
we programmed a computer so it could mimic human subjective
time?
There is wide variation in time as
subjectively experienced, ranging from sensory-deprived boredom
to stress-induced
trauma. A second can feel like and be remembered like an hour or
a day or a lifetime.
There are probably limits to what can be stored in short-term
memory. In
moments of life-or-death crisis that limit is broken and
short-term spills over
to long-term, and the mass of data that is perceived gets
indelibly imprinted
in long-term memory and takes up far more memory capacity than
is normal.
You could think in terms of time
itself going faster or slower, like varying speeds of the Now
turntable. Or imagine
that stress can trigger the brain as well as the body to operate
in exceptional
ways, enabling the perception, processing and storing of far
more data far more
quickly than normal.
This notion of variable subjective
time or variable speeds of time reminds me of a radio receiver
tuning in to
different frequencies. It also reminds me of the video series
Stranger Things
which triggered this sequence of thought. In that story
El/Eleven moves to another
dimension or set of dimensions, the UpSideDown, through sensory
deprivation.
I'm also reminded of a story called
"Never-Ending Now" which I wrote back in college. In popular
wisdom,
when you are near death, your whole life flashes before your
eyes. I imagined
that in the moments before death that might happen over and over
again, that time
expands subjectively, in a variant of Zeno's Paradox. Just as
Achilles never
catches up with the turtle, you, subjectively, never reach
death. That is the limit
that you get closer and closer to but never reach. To anyone
else, your timeline
ends. You die. But to you, you keep getting closer and closer
forever. Or
perhaps the Now needle which is your self leaves the groove
which has been your
time or moves to another.
Physical time goes at a constant
pace. But subjective time - the time you sense and remember - is
relative. To a
two-year-old, one year is half of his life. To a fifty-year-old,
one year is 2%
of the life he has led. Hence, as you get older, time seems to
go faster. And
the present seen in the context of an ever-expanding past
becomes more and more
insignificant.
But you
can choose to
perceive time differently.
A novelist chooses the perspective
from which to tell a story, and the success of the story depends
on that choice.
Similarly, you can choose the perspective from which to view
your own life. If
you wish, you can keep your focus on the near-term, the
here-and-now, and the near
future.
You should do what matters to you, and
accomplish what you can, taking pride in it in the context of
the present and
the near future, not in terms of the distant past and the
distant future.
You should do what you can do in the
time allotted to you. That is your role in life. That's where
you may find the
meaning of life.
In
the summer of 2012, driving back to Boston from Cape Cod, I
came close to
death.
I was alone, driving a van
packed tight with
stuff we had brought to the Cape for a two-week vacation. My
wife, Barb, was cleaning
the cabin and would be following in our other car in about an
hour.
Three
miles from the Sagamore Bridge over the Cape Cod Canal, I
realized that my
brakes didn;t work at all.
The
traffic around me was travelling at 60 miles an hour. The
distance between me
and the car in front of me was a car length. The car behind me
was also a car
length away. There were cars to the right of me as far as the
eye could see. To
the left of me there was a metal barrier.
The
car ahead of me slowed. I gently tapped my brakes. Nothing
happened. I tapped again
quickly. Nothing. There was no resistance to my foot pressure.
Now I was just a
couple feet away from the car in front of me. I stomped down
on the brake
peddle, and the peddle went all the way to the floor with no
resistance and no change
in speed.
Fortunately,
the car ahead picked up speed. We were going downhill. I was
coasting.
Options
rushed through my mind.
I
tried to downshift, but the gears were locked.
I
considered using the emergency parking brake. But if I stopped
suddenly, the
car behind me would slam into me and I'd end up in a pile-up.
I
considered turning off the ignition. But the van I was driving
had power
steering. If the engine turned off, the power steering would
shut off as well.
After
what felt like an hour but probably was less than a minute,
around a curve, the
hill ended and I found myself on a slight incline. Then, a
grass median strip opened
up to my left. I turned left onto the grass and the car
started slowing down. In
what felt like another hour but was only a few seconds, the
car came to a stop,
a few hundred yards from the bridge.
My
heart was racing. I saw the van, the grass, the road, the
traffic, the
beautiful blue sky with a clarity I had never seen before. My
mind was muddled,
but I was feeling ever so high, so relieved. I was alive. I
had never before
felt so much alive.
(excerpt
from from my story collection Chiang Ti Tales)
Long ago, before man made books to
talk across centuries, a young man, Chiang Ti, left his village
in the valley
and went up to the mountains. With all the comings and goings in
the village in
the valley, no one had time to think beyond the next harvest.
But Chiang Ti needed
to know why the sun rose, and why the grass grew, and why men
lived and grew
and died. So he went up, close to the sky and the stars and the
sun, up to the
mountains.
The following spring, Chiang Ti
returned to the village with an answer. "A human life has no
beginning and
no end," he said. "The time of the sun and the stars is not the
time
of man. His mind has a time of its own.
"An hour's sleep is but a
moment. And the second before a race begins can seem to last for
hours. Imagine
a condemned man on the scaffold with the rope around his neck.
To him, how long
does that moment last? What thoughts run through his mind? One
minute to live,
half a minute, a quarter, an eighth... And what minute, half
minute, quarter,
eighth... did you begin to be? The promise of eternal life was
in the endless
moment of conception. It's fulfillment is in the endless moment
of death.
"What need is there for laws,
judges, prisons? The final judgment, hell, and paradise are
within you. Just
remind people of the horrors or pleasures that could await them
in that last endless
moment, and there will be no more crime. All will live in
peace and love."
But the
doctor said,
"Many people die in their sleep, unaware that death is
approaching. Does
your theory apply in that case? Or do those people simply die,
with no heaven
and no hell?"
Chiang Ti
suffered a
century of frustration. A moment later, he turned and walked
back to the
mountains to look within himself for other answers.
I enjoy binge-watching video series.
I used to do this with DVDs, now I do it streaming using
Netflix, Amazon Prime,
and other services. Recently, I've watched: West Wing, House of
Cards, Mad Men,
Schitt's Creek, Love Sick, Scandal, Shameless, Homeland, Game of
Thrones, Big
Bang Theory, Sheldon, Dharma and Greg, The Borgias, Third Rock
from the Sun,
Frankie and Grace, Episodes, Coupling, Newsroom, Allie McBeall,
Falling Skys,
Suits, Picket Fences, Gilmore Girls, Rome, Spartacus, How I Med
Your Mother,
Life in Pieces, Jane the Virgin, Modern Family, Stranger Things,
Heart of Dixie...
In the old days, the only choice for
watching series was broadcast television. Typically, 22 episodes
constituted a
season, and the episodes were broadcast one per week, with the
time slots for
the rest of the year being reruns. It was a stop-start
experience, often with
cliff-hanger stories to encourage viewers to come back next week
or next year.
The advent of video recorders changed
that experience. You could save episodes and watch them whenever
your wanted or
in a bunch. You could rent or buy. You were no longer
constrained by the broadcst
schedule. You could fast-forward past commercials. You could
pause. You could rewind
and rewatch. You were in control.
Then came cable with video on demand
and DVRs, giving you similar control even more conveniently.
Now with streaming, you don't have
to plan ahead. You can at any moment decide to binge on a series
and watch one
episode after another, from the first episode of the series
through the last
one, often without commercials. Watching in that mode, with only
the
interruptions you want, you can get deeply involved in stories
and identify closely
with the characters, and see the actors growing up and aging −
like time-laps
photography, watching grass grow or a flower bloom, where what
normally takes
days or months or years unfolds for you fast enough for you to
enjoy the spectacle
of change. Or you can choose to watch in stop-start mode, with
breaks as long
as you want, to suit your personal schedule and life style.
Viewing series by streaming has
affected my perception of time. It has started me wondering if
time itself
continuous or discontinuous.
Film mimics action. A series of still
photos viewed in rapid succession looks like natural movement.
The faster the
sequence, the smoother and more natural-seeming the motion. The
camera takes a
series of discrete pictures of real action; and, in playback,
you see that
action mimicked, and would not notice that it was an illusion,
unless you viewed
it in slow motion. And with animation, photos taken of still
images, whether drawings
or models, get replayed as action, making the impossible look
natural.
You can get the reverse effect by turning
on a strobe light in a dark room. Then you perceive what would
otherwise look
like smooth motion as a sequence of discontinuous still shots.
The human eye and brain evolved with
this capability of converting a sequence of still images into
the perception of
motion. What was the survival benefit of this capability, which
we evolved long
before the invention of motion pictures? Why should we presume
that the underlying
reality which we perceive is smooth continuous motion? Rather,
it seems likely
that reality is discontinuous, like a series of still shots; and
that we evolved
the ability to perceive it as continuous because that provided
practical
benefits.
In other words, it is possible that
time itself, the medium in which motion occurs, is
discontinuous, just as what
we perceive as continuous solid matter actually consists of
molecules and atoms
and force fields and is mostly empty space.
So how small is the basic unit of
time and what is the time between time?
Normally we talk about time by analogy
with space. In that mode, time is one dimensional like a line.
A spatial line extends infinitely. And
time extends infinitely in the past and also in the future. By
this spatial
analogy, those are two directions on the same line. A point is
the intersection
of two lines. It is dimensionless. It has no extent. It can be
thought of as infinitely
small. By analogy, we could think of a moment as the
intersection of two times
lines.
How could there be more than one
time line? Or why shouldn't there be?
There can be an infinite number of
points on any line and on any line segment, no matter how small.
But in the
case of time, there is only one point − Now − which seems to
move along the line
in just one direction. Behind Now extends the past, and in front
of it extends
the future.
If the analogy of a line to time is
useful, the line need not be straight and need not be limited to
a single
plane. While a spatial line is itself one-dimensional, it can
curve and spiral,
thereby existing in three spatial dimensions. In fact, since
nothing can be
straighter than a beam of light, and gravity either distorts
space-time or bends
a beam of light, in the real world all spatial lines exist in at
least three
spatial dimensions. Hence, by analogy, the time-line can be
thought to exist in
three temporal dimensions.
Instead of thinking of time as a straight
line, visualize it as a line on a surface, which might be
irregularly shaped. There
might be multiple, even an infinite number of lines on this
surface, which might
be warped this way and that, and might have a shape that
changes, regularly or
randomly. The lines on this surface may never intersect, so then
it would be
necessary to define Now in a way that doesn't involve
intersections. By analogy
with a record on a turntable, we might define Now as the
intersection of
the groove with the needle. The surface moves, the needle stays
in the
groove/line. Where the needle has been is the past. Where it is
headed is the
future. And where it touches is Now.
We define time by motion: the hands
of a clock, the rotation of the Earth, the perceived motion of
the sun and
stars. A digital clock belies that concept by displaying a
sequence of numbers
in stagger-step − one number, then another, then another −
discrete changes
rather than smooth continuous movement.
We might ask if reality consists of
smooth continuous changes i.e. analog or of stop-start discrete
changes i.e. digital.
If discrete changes were small enough, we wouldn't perceive them
any more than
we see the discrete frames in a movie played at full speed. So
the resolution
of this question is beyond the limits of our perception.
We can make machines that perceive
and record far more accurately than our all-too-human senses and
brain. But the
machines we rely on to extend our sensory and processing and
memory capabilities
are all digital − based on two discrete choices − yes or no; one
or zero − and
hence the resolution of this question is beyond the ability of
machines as well
− at least beyond the ability of digital machines.
When Isaac Newton published his Principia,
explaining the laws of gravity, he presumed that those laws
would apply not just
for the Earth or our solar system or the observable stars − but
everywhere.
A hundred years ago, in A
Pluralistic Universe, William James came to a different
conclusion. He
speculated that reality isn't necessarily neat or logical or
predictable.
Beauty and simplicity are not synonymous with truth. Rather, the
world we live
in is messy and full of surprises, and the farther from Earth,
the more likely
the surprises. He believed that scientists should continually
test their
assumptions.
Recent books such as The Elegant
Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos both by
Brian Greene, Warped
Passages by Lisa Randall, and Parallel Worlds by
Michio Kaku explain
the many flavors of string theory, which is a possible successor
to quantum theory,
which was the successor to relativity, which was the successor
to Newtonian physics.
These books describe a variety of ways to explain the data that
scientists have
gathered, such as multiple universes, multiple dimensions, dark
matter, dark
energy, and negative gravity. They build on the notion that we
can understand
realms of being that are far beyond our normal experience.
Our ability to make sense of the
world around us evolved in this world. Our senses and our
reasoning power are
adequate for everyday life. But I believe we are not equipped to
understand what
happens on scales smaller than an electron, or larger than a
galaxy, much less
in multiple universes.
There is no reason to presume that
the universe, viewed through our limited and flawed senses, is
simple and
logical enough for us to understand it. Rather, the universe may
be complex and
discontinuous. Natural laws that apply in our solar system and
in our galaxy
may not apply elsewhere or may not be stable; and if
natural laws change, they
may not change in predictable ways.
For instance, consider Hubble's Law.
As Wikipedia states it, "the redshift in light coming from
distant
galaxies is proportional to their distance." Our calculations of
the distances
from Earth to stars and galaxies depend on that principle,
presuming that the
same natural laws that apply here also apply thousands,
millions, and even billions
of light years away. That assumption has mind-boggling
consequences. If there
are, in fact, discontinuities in reality and variations in
natural laws beyond
our galaxy, then what scientists have concluded about the size
and nature and past
and future of this universe, much less other universes, is in
serious doubt.
We should consider the possibility
that reality is messy, and that complex answers may sometimes
prove more useful
and suggestive than simple ones. Maybe there are two or more
realities unfolding
in parallel. Blink and you switch to a different life.
While
the simplest answer may be the most probable, it may not be
the most
interesting. And the universe is very interesting.
Science progresses by testing
educated guesses − hypotheses. But hypotheses depend on
expectations based on
previous knowledge and cultural bias.
We face the same limitation in
everyday life. We filter what we see based on what we expect to
see. We ignore
anything seriously out of the range of our expectations. If we
don't ask the
right questions, we don't get the right answers. And as human
beings, we have a
limited range of hypotheses we are likely to consider plausible.
Intuition and
thinking-outside-the-box can expand that range, but not by much.
Today, computer simulation is used
widely in conjunction with physical experiments to generate
hypotheses and then
test them. But such simulation typically stays within the range
of human expectations.
To overcome that limitation, we need
programs which generate hypotheses that are implausible and
would not otherwise
be considered; programs that come up with complex and improbable
ideas and ways
to test them. Such hypotheses could lead to experiments that
record and help
interpret data that would otherwise be ignored.
In the Middle Ages, the rule of
thumb known as Occam's Razor was important in setting
the stage for
scientific advancement. "One should not increase, beyond what is
necessary,
the number of entities required to explain anything." That rule
made
practical sense because humans have limited time and limited
brain power − focus
your research on the most likely explanations. In today's
vernacular KISS −
"keep it simple stupid."
Now computers can deal with far more
variables than humans can; and can calculate trees of causation
far further;
and hence can identify multiple explanations for the same event,
all valid from
different perspectives, and perhaps eacy leading to different
long-term consequences.
It is time to move beyond Occam's Razor, to expand the range of
our research to
deal with the complex, the unlikely, the redundant, and even the
totally
outlandish, admitting the possibility that truth might be messy
rather than
systematic and beautiful.
When I was reading The
Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, which explains
superstring theory for
the masses, I was also reading Quicksilver by Neal
Stephenson, an historical
novel with Sir Isaac Newton as a character. On p. 670 of Quicksilver,
one of the characters challenges a basic concept of calculus. He
asks, "What
happens then if we continue subdividing? ... Is it the same all
the way down?
Or is it the case that something happens eventually, that we
reach a place
where no further subdivision is possible, where fundamental
properties of
Creation are brought into play?"
The character is contrasting Newton's
notion of infinite subdivision, with other concepts of the world
in which there
is a natural limit to such subdivision.
There appears to be a contradiction between
superstring theory, which postulates an ultimate unit of length,
and the
assumption of calculus that space is infinitely divisible.
I sent an email to Brian Greene, wondering
if fundamental concepts and procedures of calculus need to be
refined to take
this ultimate unit of length into account.
He was kind enough to reply,
"In fact, that is just what we are working on today. The notion
that the
usual procedures of calculus are only relevant on length scales
larger than some
lower limit--we are trying to piece together the new procedures
that take
over."
We're told that dark matter and dark
energy account for 95.1% of all there is in the universe.
Ordinary matter
amounts to just 4.9%. The exact numbers change with new
scientific advances,
but the overwhelming dominance of the dark over the ordinary
remains constant.
You can't see dark matter. You can't
feel it or smell it or interact with it in any way. In
aggregate, dark matter
and dark energy account for the gravitational force that is
necessary for
equations that are fundamental to our understanding of the
physical world.
Basically, dark matter and dark energy are a fudge factor. If we
want to
believe that we understand the physical world, if we want to
believe that the
physical laws which hold true in our solar system and our galaxy
also hold true
billions of light years way, if we want to believe we can look
back 14 billion
years and ahead billions of years and understand what was
happening and what
will happen, then we have to believe in dark matter and dark
energy.
But concepts like spirit, soul, and
self are non-scientific, beyond the pale, mere mystical
speculation.
(excerpt
from my fantasy
The Lizard of Oz, in which an elementary school class on
a field trip
goes to the Underworld. You need to stand under the world to
understand it. There
are many levels of understanding.)
Everybody in the class put on sunglasses
and stretched out on the beach, with the waves tickling their
toes. They felt
even better than they had when they fell into the river from the
mushroom.
Maybe they were relieved to be safe after all the danger they
had passed through.
Miss Osborne, in particular felt good that the quest was ending.
Finally they
were in Ome, and soon they'd be Home.
"Gosh," said Donny,
"that bush over there looks like it's on fire."
Everybody went running to the bush.
Timmy got close enough to touch it.
"Watch out!" shouted Miss
Shelby. "You'll get burnt."
"But it isn't burning, Miss Shelby,"
Timmy answered.
"Of course it's burning,"
said Miss Shelby. "You can see it's on fire."
But when she got closer, she too saw
it wasn't burning.
"I wish Mr. Shermin were here,"
she said. "He was so good at explaining things. I learned so
much from
him."
"Why that's the fire that
doesn't burn," said Miss Osborne, and she rushed forward with
the stick
that Plato had given her.
"What are you doing?" asked
Joey.
"I want to see if this stick
will catch fire, so we can bring the fire back home."
The stick glowed when she put it in
the bush; but when she took it out, the glow faded.
"Do you think it's God?"
asked Miss Shelby.
"Beware," a voice boomed,
like it was coming from a loudspeaker.
Miss Shelby screamed, "The bush
is talking!"
But Donny said, "Gosh, no, Miss
Shelby. It's that astronaut over there.",
On top of the hill two men in space
suits were walking toward them, waving as frantically in their
cumbersome suits
let them.
"Stand back from that bush,"
they said. "Return to the water. This area is contaminated.
Radioactive
material."
Everybody ran back to the water and
got up to their waists in it. The spacemen plodded close to
them.
"What's wrong?" asked Miss
Osborne. "Did somebody drop a bomb or something?"
"No,
miss, it's a
natural phenomenon," answered one of the men. "Alpha and omega
particles.
It's long been a mystery, but we're very close to a
break-through. Research has
been going on here for years. Scientists named this land "Ohm"
because
they thought the phenomenon was electrical. An ohm is a measure
of electrical
resistance. But just last week we successfully separated and
identified the two
major forms of radiation: the alpha particle and a new particle
we've christened
the ohm-ega particle. That's an event of cosmic significance."
Miss Shelby explained to the class,
"That means it's very important."
"Well, not really," the
scientist corrected her. "Alpha and omega particles are cosmic
rays and
our discovery is very important in the study of cosmic rays. But
nobody's sure
how significant cosmic rays are in elementary particle physics."
Miss Shelby explained to the class,
"Elementary means basic. The most important things, the building
blocks
you need for further study are elementary. Our school is an
elementary
school."
"It's different in physics,"
the scientist explained. "Elementary particles are very
advanced. Not that
we've advanced that far in our knowledge of them, but that only
advanced students
ever study them. Actually, very few people study them, and we
know very little
about them and how they relate to the world of ordinary
experience."
"You mean they don't
matter?"
"Brilliant, my dear, brilliant!"
he exclaimed. "Particles matter. The very word we've
been looking
for. It's difficult to explain what happens at the subatomic
level. Sometimes we
talk of matter, and other times we talk of energy. Neither
concept alone is
sufficient, and yet the concepts of energy and matter seem
mutually exclusive.
When we try to put them together, we wind up with
strange-sounding expressions
like 'matter waves.' It all makes sense in terms of equations;
but when we try
to tell people what we're doing, language keeps leading us into
trouble. The
words we use often mean more than we mean them to mean.
"We have to be very careful
with our words, for they can imply whole systems of thought, and
no single
system of thought or set of concepts is adequate for describing
the world around
us. We are faced with the difficult task of using contradictory
sets of
concepts, now using one and now another, according to the needs
of the moment.
It's a complicated process that can only to be learned by
experience. There are
no signposts to tell us when to use which."
"Gosh," said Donny, "
Winthrop's like that. There aren't any street signs, and it's
awful easy to get
lost unless you've got a magic coin."
Miss Shelby started to reprimand
Donny for interrupting, but the scientist just kept talking.
"Particles matter," he
said. "That's beautiful. A simple pun might make it easier to
talk about elementary
particles. Yes, 'matter' is a verb as well as a noun, and on the
subatomic
level it makes more sense to use the word as a verb. Light isn't
matter as a
noun, but it is matter as a verb. Language, for all its
pitfalls, is capable of
unexpected beauties. Its very imprecision can be a source of
clarity. Light
matters. Electrons matter. Elementary particles matter. Perhaps
even matter
matters."
"I certainly hope so,"
said Miss Shelby. "I'd hate to think people spend their lives
studying
things that don't matter."
The scientist laughed, "That's
another good one. The words keep meaning more than we mean them
to mean. If we
aren't careful, we might find ourselves talking about values and
morals and
other things that have nothing to do with physics."
After World
War II, authors like Sartre and Camus reacted against abstract
philosophy that
neglected the immediacy, emotion, and empathy of everyday life.
They blamed abstract
dehumanized thinking for the horrors of the Third Reich. In
opposition to that
perspective, they harkened back to Dostoyevsky and other writers
who believed
that we are defined by our actions, regardless of the
rationalizations we might
use to justify what we do. Action in that sense means far
more than
muscle movement. They focused on decisive moments when one puts
one's whole
self behind what one does, where one is willing to risk everything
to do what
one feels must be done. Such acts are fraught with meaning due to
the context in
which they are performed. Such acts, particularly ones involving
self-sacrifice/martyrdom,
can trigger a tidal wave of consequences, For example, Moses
standing up
against Pharaoh, the martyrs of the early Christian church, Sir
Thomas More
standing up to Henry VIII, Martin Luther rebelling against the
Catholic Church,
and the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Few of us will
ever perform history-changing heroic feats. But we all do affect
one another
through principled, heartfelt acts that serve as memorable and
inspiring examples
to those around us. And what, at the time, may seem an
insignificant act could
through its influence on others have major consequences.
Through our genes,
we are connected to those who came before and those who will come
after us. Through
ideas and chains of teaching and learning, we are connected to
those who inspired
us and whom we inspire. And we are also connected to one another
by the consequences
of our meaningful acts.
In an extended
game of chess, there comes a moment when the tree of branching
possibilities
reverses − you visualize the ideal end position, and instead of
from planning
ahead, you begin to plan backwards, figuring out how to get to
that ideal end position.
As those of us
in the baby boomer generation retire and start new lives, we find
ourselves in
a unique position with regard to when we recognize that we are in
end game.
Previous generations
knew that they would die, but, for the most part, had little or no
idea of how
or when. Advances in medicine and genetics are now making possible
early diagnosis
of long-term fatal illnesses. New treatments can postpone the
onset of such conditions
and slow their progress. But it will probably take decades before
cures and more
effective preventive measures are developed. That means that many
of our generation
will learn that they have a long-term illness and will live for
years with that
knowledge and with everyday reminders of impending disability and
death.
How will we meet
the challenge of knowing that we are in end game? How will that
knowledge change
how we choose to live the rest of our lives and how we perceive
the meaning of
our lives?
I suspect that
we can learn something of value from this experience and pass that
on to future
generations who may not be subject to such illnesses. Then the
stories of our
lives might provide insights into human relationships and into how
we should live
and who we can become.
The history of
man is typically described in three stages: hunting/gathering,
farming, and
industrial.
Consider an
alternative grouping: hunting/gathering, farming/industrial, and
techno-global.
In this way of viewing human history, each stage has a different
value system
learned through the struggle for survival; the industrial stage is
an extension
of the farming stage; and we now find ourselves at the beginning
of a new
stage.
Let's take a closer look at these three stages.
Stage one — hunting/gathering, pre-history
physical strength and personal survival skills
matter
man vs. beast/the elements
knowledge, skill, and experience are necessary for
survival in a
world over which you have no control
Stage two — farming/industrialization,
from pre-history
to the end of the 20th century
domesticating and controlling animals/beasts of
burden
substituting machines for animals, with the
advance of technology
controlling workers
substituting machines for workers, with the
advance of technology
central authority dominates in government and
business
man as owner and controller of land, beasts, and
other men
man performing machine-like tasks until machines
can do them
weeding, killing off runts, and eliminating the
weak and handicapped
values learned from farming support
industrialization and nationalization
Stage three — techno-global, now
global interdependence
global communication and global economy
values of knowledge, skill, and experience
technology makes possible new ways of working
together and
living together
technology enables group action and coordination
without
central control
the weak and handicapped deserve equal rights
our responsibilities extend beyond our family and
our local
district
we are all citizens of the entire planet
technology extends human knowledge and
capabilities.
From this perspective, farming and
industrialization were
different aspects of the same control-based value system, which
lasted more
than 10,000 years. And we are now at the beginning of a new stage,
characterized
by cooperation, compassion, and interdependence.
We should not
judge the merit of our efforts based on their immediate
consequences. Over time,
our perspective will change. What we are proud of today, one day
we may regret.
And what we regret today, one day we may be proud of.
We should do
what we feel is right and do it to the best of our ability. If
each person behaves
that way − given the diverse mix of what people believe is right
and of what
they are capable of − human endeavor will advance over the long
haul, regardless
of temporary ups and downs.
In many cases,
if we knew beforehand the long-term effects of what we were about
to do, we wouldn't
do it. But looking even further ahead, the effects could be the
reverse, and
what we now would dread might then be deemed good and necessary,
because the
context and hence the meaning will have changed. As Heraclitus
observed, you can
never cross the same river twice. If you could relive any moment
of your life,
it wouldn't be the same moment, because your knowledge, your
perspective, and
your motivation would be different.
When my Dad
was 86, he had trouble sleeping. In his dreams, he revisited the
decision
points in his life and wondered why the consequences of his
decisions turned out
one way rather than another. He wondered whether he had made the
right choices,
and what could have happened if he had acted otherwise. He was
heavy with regret.
I told him
that I believe that we have natural proclivities, and that what
seem like decisions
often aren't decisions at all. In our guts, we know what we have
to do because
we are who we are. The reasons we give for our actions are often
rationalizations
we cobble together afterwards. Yes, random events affect our
lives. But, in many
cases, such events only knock us off track temporarily, and then
we continue toward
the same goal by a different path.
There's a
shape to the landscape in which we live our lives, with mountains
and valleys. As
we approach a decision-point, if we go in one direction everything
gets more
difficult and painful − we trip over ourselves; we can't find the
words; we
forget things that we have to remember; we are at odds with
ourselves. And in
another direction the path feels right. If we go the first way
despite the
obstacles, soon there's another choice and another. And sooner or
later we find
our way back to what is natural for us.
Hence, we
shouldn't judge what we do based on what we believe will be the
long-term consequences.
Rather, we should do what we feel is best for now and do it to the
best of our
ability.
Our lives
aren't as subject to random occurrences as at first appears, nor
are we as much
in control of our lives as at first appears. I believe there is
more to our
lives than we are ever likely to realize, and that that should
inspire wonder,
curiosity, and reverence.
One night, I
saw three hoodlums with machetes walk through the outside wall of
my second-floor
bedroom. I screamed. I had seen this vision while awake.
It took a
while for my breathing and heart rate to slow down. In the
process, it occurred
to me that I had come close to being scared to death. Then I
realized that I
had been scared to life.
A dream like that ---- not an ordinary dream
composed of images
from everyday life, and not a recurring dream heavy with
symbolism, but one
that comes out of nowhere and that you see while semi-awake − must
serve a
purpose.
That vision
was a wakeup call for me, like a near-death experience. It was a
reminder of my
mortality, a warning that if there was anything I really wanted to
do, I'd
better do it. If the obvious physical signs of health issues or
aging aren't
enough to get me going, then my unconscious will take over and
scare me into
life.
That's what
led me to start this series of essays, trying to make sense of
questions I've
left unexamined for too long.
The experience
of that dream was an affirmation of a basic belief of mine − that
as individuals
and as a species, self-regulating mechanisms come into play,
pushing us toward
balance and reason and compassion. And in that context, our worst
experiences
and our worst fears help nudge us in the right direction, as if
some force were
trying to navigate a huge ship down a river, with the crudest of
controls − a
push this way, then a push that way. Toward what goal?
(excerpts from my novel Beyond the Fourth Door)
Soon after the
death of her daughter Sue, Sarah surprised the Reverend
Schumacher-- it was she
who had a passage she wanted to understand. "What does the word
'mansions'
mean in the King James version of John 14:2, 'There are many
mansions in my
Father's house'? How can there be mansions in a house? A house is
small. A mansion
is big. It makes no sense. Why would one translator say 'rooms'
and another
'mansions'? What did Christ really say?"
The Reverend
Schumacher was delighted that Sarah had asked him. "Christ is
speaking to his
disciples at the Last Supper. He is telling them about life after
death. He is reassuring
them that there will be room enough for them in heaven, his
Father's house.
Perhaps it's meant as an echo of the Christmas story − in heaven
there will be room
in the inn. But it suggests more than just space in which to live.
"The King
James translation just anglicized the Latin, even though 'mansion'
has a
different meaning in English. The Latin is mansio, mansionis,
which
means a stay or a sojourn, and, by extension, a halting place, a
stage of a journey.
Perhaps the passage means that life after death is a stage of a
journey; that
there are many such stages; that the journey through the house of
God is a long
one, requiring many rest stops. Perhaps our life here on Earth is
just one such
stage."
"And what
are the words in the original Greek?" she inquired, expecting that
the
words of Christ would have magical power.
The Reverend
quickly consulted the pocket-sized Greek New Testament he always
carried with
him. "En te oixia tou patros mou monai pollai eisin."
"And what
part of that means many rooms or mansions?"
"Monai pollai."
"You mean
like 'monopoly'?" she asked.
"That
word has different roots, but the Lord works in mysterious ways.
Far be it from
me to discount the suggestiveness of our living language."
"And the
key word is monai?"
"Yes, in the
singular, mone. The letters are 'mu omicron nu eta.' It's
pronounced
like the impressionist painter Monet, or like the French word for
loose change
− monnaie. It's an unusual word. Its meaning is very
similar to the Latin
mansio. But, to the best of my knowledge, there are no
words in English
that derive from it. Money, monopoly, and monastery all come from
different
roots. You might say it's a word that died without offspring."
"I often
think of my father's house," said Sarah. "It was a wood-frame
house
connected to a barn with a passageway, so you wouldn't have to go
out in the
snow to get to your horse and buggy. It's still standing − painted
blue now instead
of white, and they've turned part of the barn into a garage. We
lived in the
few steam-heated rooms in the center of the house. But in the
summer, I spent
lots of time in the many rooms of the attic, the barn, and the
basement and in
the 'secret passageway.' That was what we called the crawlspace
under the peak
of the roof that led from the barn to the house. I hope that God's
house has
rooms like that − rooms to go off and be alone in, rooms where you
can cuddle
up with a good book, big empty rooms you can fill with your
imagination.
"These
last few nights I've dreamt that there's this secret room where I
stored my
most precious things − things that have been lost for years: a
rusty iron ring
a boy gave me in grammar school, a notebook of poems I wrote, and
photos of Sam
my brother who ran away from home. And last night, it wasn't just
the photos
that were there, but Sam himself, and Sue, too. Sam and Sue had
been playing a
game of hide and seek. I just had to find the right room."
***
(twenty years later)
Sarah exited
very quietly a month and a half after her fiftieth anniversary,
after most of
the family had returned to jobs and school. Irene was sitting in
the bedroom
with her, reading a paperback collection of movie scripts. It was
her turn to
watch in case Sarah needed anything. Irene didn't notice the
moment of passing.
She thought Sarah was still asleep. An hour or two later, Hank
came in to give
her pain-killing pills and found her stiffening form.
The Reverend
Schumacher conducted the funeral service. "I knew Sarah for thirty
years," he explained. "Over that time I've gotten a reputation for
the
eccentric interpretations I give to biblical passages in my
sermons. I must
confess that Sarah was my inspiration. She had a wonderful and
naive faith in
the power of language − of all languages. At Christmas she'd wish
us all 'Mary
Christmas, and Joseph New Year.' She was intrigued by the echoes
she'd hear − the
meanings and associations that appeared as if by accident of
translation. She felt
they were part and parcel of the mystery of God, and we would
puzzle and rejoice
over them together.
"When her
daughter Sue died, we puzzled over the passage: 'There are many
mansions in my
father's house.' I liked to think of the word 'mansion' in the
Latin sense of
stages of a journey − the notion that this life is just one stage
in a much
longer journey. Sarah preferred the English sense of 'mansion' as
a huge house with
many rooms, and dying as moving from one room to another or one
mansion to another.
I imagine her now, a little girl, standing in a vast and strange
new mansion − lost
and in awe; not frightened, just very curious, as she has always
been.
"Today, in pondering what to say as a farewell, a
hackneyed
phrase came to mind: 'And now Sarah is with God.' I had a moment
of recognition
− an epiphany, like an electric shock. It was a typically 'Sarah
phrase.' Just
a few months ago, she had puzzled over the echoes of "Mary was
with
child," and "the Word was with God". And now I cannot help but
think, 'Sarah was with child, and now she is with God.' And may
the mystery of
those words be revealed to her in everlasting joy."
(excerpt from my novel The Name of Hero)
"Why do
you pray?" Sasha asked his mother. She was kneeling in front of an
icon of
Christ as she always did before going up to bed. He was on the
brink of
manhood.
She glared up
at him, then squeezed her eyes shut, trying to concentrate again
on her prayer.
He had just passed
his last exam in geography, his worst subject. Proud of himself,
he would soon be
out on his own, away from his despotic mother. He had an urge to
provoke her, to
arouse her martyred wrath. But despite himself, he would miss her
and the
simple pattern of her rewards and punishments, the certainty of
her disapproval
when he broke her rules.
"Why do
you pray?" he persisted.
She opened her
eyes, pursed her lips, and heaved a sigh of disappointment. "Have
I raised
a heathen? Don't you believe in God?"
"No,"
he surprised himself with his answer. He observed all the forms of
religion,
including prayer. But since the typhoid death of his sister Lilia,
he had
avoided thinking about God.
Lilia and he
had squabbled often. He teased her; she retaliated. Through their
running battles
they grew close, testing themselves against one another,
anticipating one another's
responses. Then she was gone. It was as if he had been standing in
front of a
mirror, showing off his abilities. Then, suddenly, the mirror was
gone and he
was standing before an endless dark chasm.
For days he
had prayed to God to bring her back or to wake him from this
nightmare.
Then he had asked for a sign that there was a God.
But silence
was the only answer. He had cursed God and all of creation. He had
cursed
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He had cursed the Church and the
priests and all believers.
And he had dared God to strike him dead for such blasphemy, as he
knelt,
trembling, beside his bed, cursing God innocently, in the humble
posture of
prayer; saying he didn't believe in God, but fully expecting at
any moment to be
struck by a bolt of lightning.
There was no
lightning. But he continued his ritual of evening prayers, never
asking himself,
as he asked his mother now, "Why do you pray? Do you expect that
God is going
to give you something? that He's going to do something for you?"
"No,"
she answered. He was shocked that she took his question seriously.
He had expected
her to attack him verbally, as she had so often with far less
provocation. But
instead, she sank into self-reflection, as if his question had
awakened old
memories. She looked old and defenseless. He had never thought of
her as old
before. He had never seen her with her guard down like this. He
was used to her
using her diminutive size and presumed frailty as a weapon. She
manipulated people
by making them pity her. She was well practiced at assuming the
look of a
martyr, and she did so with finesse and authority. But now the
muscles of her
face hung more loosely than he had ever seen before. She was an
active, dynamic
woman in her early fifties. But for the moment, the energy was
gone from her
face. She just looked old.
"Then why
do you pray?" he persisted.
"I suppose
... because I'm weak... because I'll die."
Sasha
continued, "But I remember when we were in Switzerland, at
Father's
grave." His mother was clearly shaken. He knew his words were
hurting her,
but still he kept up this line of questioning. "You brought Meta
and me
back to visit the grave, years after he had died. You asked a
Catholic priest to
say a prayer at his grave, because Father had been Catholic. The
priest
refused. He said Father wasn't Catholic enough because he had
married an
Orthodox woman and let the children be raised Orthodox. You cried
and told him
that his prayers weren't worth anything, that prayers hadn't kept
Father alive,
that no prayers were worth anything. And yet every night you still
pray. Can you
tell me why?"
"I don't
know," she admitted, bewildered as he had never seen her before.
"Whatever happens to me, I always want to pray...to talk to God...
I can't
imagine living without praying. I suppose even animals pray."
They were both
silent for a while. Then she continued. "I remember a conversation
I had
with an old priest when Anatole, the man I was betrothed to, died,
just a week
before we were to be married, and I believe he said almost the
same words to me
When I returned years later, when your father died. I was numb,
empty.
"The
priest asked me what was wrong.
"I answered,
'Death.'
"'Is that
all?' he asked.
"'That
there is death. The fact of death."
"'Yes, it
is just a fact, just a fact. Facts you find in the outside world.
They can be proved
and disproved. They can change. Unlike faith. Faith you find
inside yourself,
beyond change, beyond proof, beyond reason. Reason sees only
change and difference.
It can only deal with distinctions − separating and combining to
arrive at 'understanding.'
"'There
is no end to the number of facts. But there is only one faith.
"'The
truth of facts we call 'pravda.'
"'The
truth of faith we call 'istina.'
"'To seek
oneness with the unchanging truth that is within you is to pray.'
Sasha's mother continued, "So I prayed then. I
shut my
eyes and shut out the world and fell into deep prayer, for hours,
remembering the
context of all the times I had prayed before, the smell of
incense, the feel of
a priest's hands on my head as a child, the tones, not the words,
of chanting.
When I came out of it, Anatole was still dead, your father was
still dead, but
I was at peace with myself and had the strength to do all the
day-to-day things
that had to be done. I believe that praying puts me in touch with
an inner reservoir
of strength. Praying is like dipping a bucket into a deep well
within
ourselves, hoping to bring up some of the water of life."
The Name of
God has special significance in the first commandment − "Do
not take
the Name of the Lord Thy God in Vain" and in the Lord's Prayer −
"Hallowed
be Thy Name."
Why this focus on the "name of God" as opposed to
God
Himself or Herself?
As Kant pointed out, there is the thing itself,
the unknowable
essence that we presume exists outside of our mind; and there is
the concept of
the thing which is the representation of the thing in our minds.
The human mind
evolved to make practical sense of the world around us, to allow
us to cope in
a world that is fundamentally unknowable.
We use names
to organize and associate thoughts, and we relate those thoughts
to our personal
experience in dealing with the world.
In the
beginning was the Word.
In traditions based
on magic, everyone has a true name which expresses that
person's nature and
knowing someone's true name gives power over that person.
Your name, whether
traditionally or randomly chosen by your parents, is an empty
vesssel that takes
on meaning over the course of your life. That name comes to stand
for the unique
person that you become. It is also a connection with others who
came before who
were given that same name.
The word name
also refers to the categories which we apply to all of creation,
like dog and cat,
in recognition of characteristics that a set of things or
creatures have in
common. In Genesis Adam and Eve named all creatures.
And the word name
is also used as a token standing for an unknowable essence − God −
enabling us
to talk about and contemplate what essentially cannot be known.
The mind uses
names to mirror the world. When we give names to what we encounter
in the world,
we set up mental equivalents that we can manipulate and compare
and remember. In
striving to understand these concepts we assign meaning to them
and associate
them with one another and meaning grows from what we think about
them as well
as from our experience in the world. With this cumulative
remembered mental
activity we enrich our lives and come to better cope with the
experiences we encounter
in the worldd.
By the ways we
associate these concepts with one another, we create maps in our
minds that
represent how we imagine the real world − not just a one-to-one
association of
ideas to things, but ideas of ideas of ideas − a rich tapestry of
layer upon layer
of associations, the names of things being far richer than the
things
themselves, because we can associate them in our minds and we can
communicate these
complex ideas to others.
To name is to begin
the effort of trying to understand.
By this line of reasoning, the Name of God is the
first step in
trying to understand what God might be.
I dreamed that
two people were hopelessly at odds with one another. Each used
language
differently. They understood the same words in different
senses. But,
eventually, through the medium of language, using words to define
other words, they
found common ground. Language was the medium for their
reconciliation, helping
bring about understanding.
When I awoke, I realized that what I had
previously presumed
was the weakness of language is its strength.
The flexible, imprecise,
self-referential nature of language makes the process of
understanding possible. There
is no absolute meaning of any word. Meaning comes from the
conflict of two people,
who use words in different ways, striving to communicate with one
another. The imprecision of their words fosters the process
of arriving at
mutual understanding. Understanding results not despite, but
because of the anarchic
creation of new words and new definitions of old words.
At the beginning
of an attempt at serious communication, the fuzziness of the words
that both
parties use is obvious. That problem initiates the dialogue
through which, by a
recursive process, using language to define language,
understanding is reached.
In other words, language's fuzziness leads to clarification and
agreement.
Two people
from different regions or backgrounds or disciplines often use the
same words
in different ways; hence when they try to communicate they can't
take the
meanings of words for granted. Therefore, they need to clarify
what they think
and work hard to sort out what the other means. That effort can
lead to greater
self-understanding as well as mutual understanding.
In
other words, language is not a static tool that people use to
communicate. Its
ambiguities and flaws force dialogue, and only through the
give and take of
dialogue is it possible to communicate concepts of
consequence.
I sometimes
have trouble remembering names
that I am familiar with — friends I haven't seen for years,
authors, political
figures, and actors/actresses.
This isn't the
kind of forgetting that Freud describes in The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life.
That kind of forgetting derives from an association between
something we want
to forget and the name we now want to remember. The repressed
memory
accidentally obscures connected memories. The association could be
sound, shape,
or some other characteristic. With that kind of forgetting, we
often can
identify the repressed memory by free association and then
remember what we
want to remember. Problem solved.
In this case, even
if and when I do remember the name, I don't know why I forgot it;
and I might forget
it again tomorrow. To deal with this kind of issue, I have started
what I call memory
cluster lists in hopes that such lists will help me
preserve my functional,
day-to-day memories.
Often, when I
forget a name, I know the context. I might know the name of the
movie that the
actor appeared in and see his face in my mind's eye, but not
recall the actor's
name. For famous people, I can use the Internet to track down the
names. So
while that kind of forgetting is a nuisance, it has no
consequences.
For personal
acquaintances, if I lose a name, I have no such backup, and I
could lose it
permanently.
I now record
in a notebook names that I do remember, organized by what these
people have in
common or the era of my life when I encountered them.
The process of
writing names down often leads me to remember other names that I
hadn't
recalled in many years. The more names in a given cluster, the
sharper the
memories and the more additional names occur to me.
(excerpt from my novel Beyond the Fourth Door)
I believe that
dreams are important for memory. They're part of the mechanism for
translating
short-term memory into long-term memory. I understand that
short-term memory is
electrical, and that long-term is chemical. Often the elderly can
still remember
events from their childhood but can't remember where they just put
a cup. It
seems like the short-term memory gets filled up, unable to take
any more. Maybe
it's like a blackboard, covered with chalk to the point that
there's no way to
distinguish anything new that's written on it from what was there
before. It needs
to be erased to be useful again. The elderly lose the ability to
clean the
slate and transfer recent information to long-term memory.
That's where
my theory strays from conventional knowledge. I believe that the
mechanism for
doing that translation is triggered by sexual stimulation.
Freud made a big deal about the connection between
dreams and sexual
fantasy. He presumed that sex is the be-all and end-all, at the
center of all our
creative activity. I would put the emphasis on memory instead. I
would say that
we dream not to fulfill unconscious sexual desires, but rather to
renew our memory
so we can continue to function as productive human beings. I would
say that
there's a connection between erotic dreams and the mechanism of
memory
translation. I would say that we dream about sex not because sex
is important,
but because memory is important. Sexual arousal triggers a set of
events that
puts our short-term memories into long-term form and then erases
the short-term
slate so it's ready to record new experience.
Other mammals
have brief periods when they are in heat and can conceive.
Adult humans
are perpectually subject to sexual stimulation and sexual dreams,
even after
they can no longer procreate. That's because sexual stimulation is
part of the mechanism
for renewing memory. And
memory, rather
than sex, may be the primary human drive.
Such an hypothesis
could lead to research which might help alleviate or cure memory
problems of
the elderly.
Thought exists
before words.
When we
associate a thought with words, the thought becomes clearer
through the association
of those words with other words and other thoughts. And the
thought becomes richer
when we share those words with other people, who then associate
them with other
words and other thoughts and engage in dialogue with us and with
one another.
What once was a shapeless glimmer of a thought
sometimes spreads
from person to person and from generation to generation, gaining
momentum and
following its own trajectory, far beyond its origins.
When I was young,
I believed that until it was expressed in words, a thought was not yet a thought. As
in the opening of the Gospel
of John, "In the beginning was the Word."
But as I get older, I sometimes grope for words to
express a
thought after that thought has taken shape in my mind. My first
choice of words
might be "on the tip of my tongue," but just out of reach; and I
scramble
to find an alternate way to express what I mean.
So, with
advancing age, it's not just retrieving memories that becomes
difficult, but
finding words as well. The thoughts are there, but the words are
not.
Perhaps that
passage from John would be better translated, "Before the
beginning was
the Thought, and the Thought was with God, and the Thought was
God…"
In the opening
sentence of the "Gospel of John," the standard English translation
reads
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the
Word was
God."
In that oft-quoted
passage, Word is from the Greek Logos, which can
also be
interpreted as logic or thought or reason. And with is
from the Greek pros.
In classical Greek,
pros plus the accusative means against.
Hence, I am intrigued
by the alternative translation, "In the beginning was Reason and
Reason
was against God and Reason was God." In other words, Reason by its
very
nature is opposed to God but, in fact, is itself God Himself.
We evolved to
cope with this world − not to understand it, but rather to deal
practically
with what we encounter. There is no reason to presume that we have
the capability
to understand this world, much less distant worlds. At our best,
what we
perceive and what our minds make of what we perceive does not
perfectly match the
world around us. And over time, our apparatus for thinking becomes
less able to
deal with new information and new circumstances, not just because
we are older,
but also because what we learn shapes how we think and what we
perceive in the
future. Learning and experience change us.
The typical
challenge to Descartes' assertion "I think therefore I am" is that
the
statement presumes the existence of a subject who can think. It
also presumes that
the subject, pronoun I − whoever or whatever does the
thinking − remains
static. That is not the case.
Since our
thinking apparatus changes over time, if I define who I am by how
and what I think,
then I am a different person today than I was 50 years ago because
my brain thinks
differently.
As William James
observed in Talks for Teachers About Psychology, if and when we
focus on one
kind of activity or one realm of knowledge, it becomes
increasingly harder
for us to learn new subjects
that are unrelated to that. We might postpone learning
calculus or a musical
instrument or a foreign language, only to discover later that we
no longer can
make sense of it or enjoy it or master it.
I wonder if I
would have made other life choices if I had understood that
principle when I
was in my 20s and 30s. As it is, I'll never master Japanese or the
clarinet or
make sense of advanced math and science.
A pessimist would
say that our ability to think deteriorates as we age, as does our
ability to
see and to hear. But my instinct tells me that what matters
overall isn't the individual
mind, but rather the results of our collective thinking and what
we do based on
that thinking: that the aging mind has characteristics that are
important in
interaction with other ways of thinking. I believe the world needs
older
thinkers, whose minds have been shaped by a variety of learning
and experience,
just as it needs young thinkers whose minds are more malleable.
One
Metaphor is a
transference of meaning from one context to another.
You enrich the
meaning of concept A, in context A, by comparing it to concept B,
in context B.
Thanks to the comparison, concept A is seen in context B and takes
on additional
meaning. This is one way that a living language grows and changes.
Some contexts
include others. The overall context of a language is its complete
literary
canon. And you could define a language as a massive set of
inter-referential
metaphors.
A new word or concept is first defined by its
context alone. "The
angry XYX gripped its prey with its six-inch claws". In English,
the word
order establishes the part of speech and the role of the word.
Associated
descriptive words and nouns and verbs add to that context. The
more usage
examples, the clearer the meaning.
Two
The meaning of
the present is defined by its context − both its past, how it
became, and its
future, what it is becoming.
Three
When reading a
printed book that we hold in our hands and that we advance through
by turning pages,
we perceive text in context − both backwards and forwards. And
when reading an
electronic book, we perceive text as a series of words presented
in order, with
the position on the page and the number of pages
dependent on
screen size and reader choice.
Since meaning
derives from context, the printed book has different and perhaps
richer meaning
than its electronic equivalent.
One Thanksgiving,
I had the opportunity to share dinner with a family I had not met
before.
While everyone
else was intimately connected, I was an observer, a total
outsider, cordially
welcomed, but not a member of this four-generation family.
I sensed the
lines of connection and togetherness which joined them. They
didn't need to say
or do anything to feel connected to one another. Each enjoyed the
vibes of being
together and sensing the joy of the others, sharing that space and
time. Words
were superfluous. The content of what they said didn't matter,
only the gestures
of communication. Being together meant feeling complete. And if
any of them
hadn't been there, they would have all felt the absence. They
would have missed
the satisfying sense of completeness.
I could also sense
the family making new connections and strengthening old ones as
they passed a three-month
old baby to one another, calming his cries, making him smile,
connecting with
him.
Someone said, "I
wonder what he's thinking." Another said, "I wonder if he can
think yet."
And it occurred to me that thinking happens without language.
Language is an
overlay, a decoration, an entertainment, a rationalization.
Real thinking
and deciding take place separately from language. An infant senses
the vibes of
connection without speaking or understanding a word.
After dinner,
the family played a game of chance that I had never seen before. I
was a
spectator, not a player; and by watching, I deciphered the rules.
Everyone started
with six quarters, and there were six dice. Each person rolled the
dice in
turn. If there was a 1, 2, or 3, nothing happened. For each 4, the
roller put one
quarter in the pot. For each 5, the roller gave a quarter to the
person to the
left. For each 6, the roller gave a quarter to the person to the
right. They
rolled as many dice as they had quarters remaining. There was no
strategy.
There were no tactics. The players made no decisions. It was a
game of pure
chance that linked all the participants in random patterns. It was
a competition
that was non-competitive.
In this game,
they gave to one another and took from one another and were
connected to one another.
They saw and shared one another's joy and frustration. They were
all happy
together. And it didn't matter who won.
Your body is a
rental. The molecules that make up your body have been recycled
over and over
again for about 14 billion years and will continue to be recycled
long after you
cease to be.
Somewhere in
the world, there are doppelgangers of you − people you'll never
meet who are not
related to you, but who look enough like you to be your twin.
The words you
use have been used over and over by other people since the
beginnings of
language. Other people have expressed or will express ideas close
to ideas of
yours.
Is there anything tangible and readily
identifiable that is
unique about you? Not fingerprints or DNA, which require analysis
by skilled
technicians, with special equipment.
Imagine a wall
full of post-its, an infinite wall. One of the post-its has
written on it the
most interesting and important idea you have ever expressed. The
other post-its
covering that infinite wall have those same words, but were
written by or will
be written by other people.
There are differences in handwriting on these
post-its that can
be interpreted as indicators of personality. But nearly all of the
current and
future post-its don't have handwriting at all − they are computer
printouts.
Your handwriting
used to be the standard indicator of your identity. A holograph
of
a
famous person, a document written entirely in the handwriting
of the author, was
a collector's treasure. A handwritten
letter can be a work of
art − not just the words, but the presentation, the handwritten
context that reveals
the character of the writer and his or her state of mind at the
time of writing.
Also the neatness, the obvious care or the hurried scrawl express
or don't
express respect for the intended recipient. Or a hurried note
could reflect the
familiarity of the correspondents − they know one another's
handwriting well
enough that there is no need to be careful, like married couples
finishing one
another's sentences. They only need clues, not clarity. They can
fill in the
gaps without even thinking about it.
Medieval copyists
were artists. They didn't just duplicate the words they saw in old
manuscripts.
Rather they embellished and beautified with color and flourishes.
Later,
business copyists, handling the correspondence of the firms they
worked for
were expected to not simply copy words from one document to
another or to
faithfully transcribe words that were dictated to them. The
finished documents
they produced reflected on the firm. Presentation, not just
accurate content,
was essential. And doing that well took skill and experience.
Think of Melville's
Bartleby, Dickens' Bob Cratchit, and the clerk-copyists in Gogol's
stories. All
men.
With the invention
of the typewriter, copying documents became a mechanical process,
rather than a
craft or art form. Low-paid typists, overwhelmingly women, took
the place of
educated and skilled clerks.
Today,
with photocopying, scanning, spell-checked word processing, and
email instead
of paper mail, the skill level required to write and copy
documents has dropped
much farther. Bosses may write their own messages. And often, it
is difficult
to determine from the presentation − the look and feel of a
document − whether
it was done by the boss or by an assistant. The document has
become anonymous.
It is no longer an indicator of identity.
Today, 41 states do not require schools to teach
cursive reading
or writing. So in a generation or two, not only will the vast
majority of
people not write by hand, they also will not be able to read
handwriting. Handwriting
will be like Latin, only understood by academics. And nearly all
those post-it
notes on that infinite wall will look just the same as every
other.
At a drug store
this morning, the clerk at the counter accidentally spilled
perfume on her
hands. There was nothing she could do to get rid of the smell.
She'd just have
to wait for it to wear off.
That's when it
occurred to me that there should be a perfume-removal product. We
have removal products
for just about everything else a woman puts on herself −
nail-polish removers,
makeup removers. Why not perfume?
Such a product
could be a winner in and of itself, but it also could be a boon to
the perfume
industry. If you could quickly, easily, and effectively remove a
fragrance, you
could get into the habit of changing fragrances, as often as you
change your
clothes or your makeup. There could be morning, afternoon,
evening, and bedtime
fragrances. There could be fragrances for business, for home, for
shopping, for
social occasions. With the right advertising, consumers could
become convinced
that such changes are not just an option, but a social necessity.
You'd feel
naked without the right fragrance, or maybe you'd feel just as
gauche using the
wrong perfume as you would wearing the wrong kind of clothes or
the wrong kind
of makeup for particular occasion.
Then it
occurred to me that perfume − not products that clean the body and
remove distasteful
odors, but rather products meant to generate an artificial
presumably attractive
odor − have a negative side-effect. Normally, the touch, the
sight, the taste,
and the smell of your partner are all connected with your
partner's identity. In
the process of falling in love, like Pavlov's dog, you learn to
associate all
those sensory cues with your beloved.
By nature, a
person's scent is unique to that person; and when you become
intimately close
to someone, your ability to recognize small differences is
heightened. But
commercial perfumes are mass produced. When a woman wears a
perfume when she is
with her partner, she unwittingly trains that person to associate
that scent,
rather than her own unique scent, with romantic feelings. You
might say she is
training her partner for infidelity.
Similarly, when
a woman dyes her hair, she takes a characteristic that can
uniquely identify
her and help her bond with her partner and trades it in for
something any other
woman could easily imitate.
On my first
trip to Disney World back in 1978, Tomorrowland struck me as dated
-- embodying
an obsolete image of the future, the future we imagined in
the1950s. This was
the future that Disney and General Electric once promised us.
"Progress is
our most important product." "Live better electrically." Back in
the 1950s, on television, we heard about the future products of
inevitable
progress. Technology was marching steadily forward. Machines were
making better machines to
make better machines. Man was the passive spectator and
beneficiary of
inevitable progress.
In 1978,
I expected to see an updated image of tomorrow in Tomorrowland.
Surely, the
people who built Disney World intended this land to represent the
tomorrow of
the present, not the tomorrow of the past. But this Tomorrowland
was a
duplicate of the first 1950s' Tomorrowland. It was yesterday's
tomorrow.
Then I
was struck by nostalgia for the 1950s, for a time when:
• we could believe in
ever-expanding
resources and energy and wealth and progress;
• we took for granted that
sooner or later
(perhaps in our lifetime) there would be regular passenger flights
to Mars and
beyond;
• costs inevitably went down
with
increasingly plentiful energy and increasingly powerful
mass-production
technology; and
• it seemed that every
time-saving convenience
product could eventually be made cheaply, as one innovation led to
another.
And I was
struck by discomfort with the present as well, with a time when:
• costs inevitably soared;
• technological innovations
gathered dust on
the inventor's shelf because they would never be economically
justifiable;
• exploration of outer space was
too costly;
• energy costs soared, and
high-speed cars and
big cars used too much energy;
• we had to cut back and slow
down; and
• we had to abandon many
time-saving
conveniences that we had grown used to as we strove to reduce our
energy and
resource consumption.
A generation
that was promised inevitable progress found itself forced to
retreat before the
energy and environmental consequences. We recognized how foolish
that quest for
"progress" was, how it led to the rapid and wasteful destruction
of
vast resources. But we couldn't help but feel nostalgia for those
halcyon days
when there were no clouds on the horizon and it was
all-systems-go. That's the
flavor of nostalgia I felt when I left Tomorrowland in Disney
World.
Now,
thinking back to that visit over forty years ago, I remember the
huge artificial
tree in Adventureland, representing the home of the Swiss Family
Robinson, and
that memory sends my speculation about the future in a different
direction.
That
display showed examples of nineteenth-century ingenuity working
with, taming,
and living in harmony with nature. Ironically, it was a
celebration of natural
living set on a huge artificial tree.
Now, that
treehouse calls to mind the ingenious techniques that people in
the past used
before they had access to electrical machinery and internal
combustion engines.
I'm amazed at what they could accomplish -- not inevitable broad,
sweeping progress,
but hard-won individual achievement.
We can no
longer afford the luxury of passive consumption. More and more,
each of us must
struggle to cope with decreasing energy supplies and increasing
costs. We need
to make the most of the objects around us. We need to turn out
unneeded lights,
insulate the attic, patch and fix clothes and gadgets that a few
years back we
would have replaced because replacement cost less than repair.
In the
past, even inside the house, we faced a constantly changing
environment. Now,
by fixing and refurbishing, we'll relate as previous generations
related to the
objects around them.
I see an
end to future shock coming with the end of passive
progress. To thrive
now and in the future, we need to become handy, persistent,
patient, and
ingenious. We need to develop traits and abilities and learn
everyday skills
that our ancestors took for granted.
A new
picture of the future emerges -- a positive and active future I
can look
forward to, identify with, and participate in.
Directly sensing
the presence of other minds and even their mood, the blind know
with certainty
that other minds exist. They don't have to, rationally, and with
great effort,
arrive at that conclusion.
A sightless person
perceives the world differently and relates to it differently than
a sighted
person. The absence of sight does not mean the brain has less data
to deal with,
but rather it has a different mix of data — not dominated by the
data of sight.
And in adapting to this different environment, the brain processes
the received
data differently, coming to different kinds of conclusions based
on different
categories than those that Kant defined.
Yes, in
interacting with sighted people and the physical-social
environment that sighted
people establish and dominate, the blind develop correspondences
between what
they perceive and what sighted people describe. The categories by
which the
blind organize and deal with the world approximate the categories
of the
sighted.
But the categories
themselves are not essential features of human existence. Rather
they are
learned. And the philosophic problems that arise from such
categories − such as
whether there exist beings other than myself who feel and think as
I do — artificial
and contingent on my having eyesight and having developed the
associated mental
processes for dealing with that type of data.
A newborn baby
does not have sight-related categories. Over time, through the
practice of dealing
with sight-dominated perceptual data in a social-cultural world
organized and
explained, talked about, and written about by others in terms of
sight-oriented
categories, the young child learns to understand the world and
his/her relationship
in terms of such categories as size and time and similarity. Hence
we believe
that learning progresses in stages, as children develop the
ability to think that
way, cf. Piaget. Hence,
too, there develop cultural
differences and also sex-role differences in how we perceive and
process the
data of life — how we understand, how we pose questions, and how
we answer questions;
what we understand as proof; what we believe without question; how
we relate to
life and death.
But our fundamental
concepts of space and time, our concept of self, and the range of
our possible
relationships with others are not structures of our minds that we
were born with,
but rather are contingent, learned, and alterable.
In different circumstances,
without the same faculties of perception or confronted with very
different perceptual
data in a world very different from today's human-dominated Earth,
the human
mind could develop in very different ways, with very different
kinds of understanding,
with different certainties, different questions, and different
answers.
I perceive therefore
I think. How I think depends on how I perceive as well as on what
I perceive.
How I think also depends on how I have learned to organize and
process what I
perceive.
In the absence
of a primary sense such as sight or hearing, other senses become
fine-tuned and
hypersensitive and varieties of intuition come to play more
prominent roles,
leading to capabilities outside the range of the basic five
senses, and leading
to structures of processing and understanding outside the range of
the sighted.
The world is
much richer than we normally presume, and our capabilities for
perceiving and
understanding extend over a wider range than philosophers have
presumed.
Today, we should turn to the blind for such
insights, and, perhaps,
in the future, we might also benefit from the insights of
computer-based entities
which operate with very different modes of perception.
In an article
in the New Yorker, July 2, 2001, Louis Menand wrote about Laura
Bridgman, a
predecessor pf Helen Keller. Fifty years before Helen, Laura
1829-1889 was the
first blind-deaf person to get an education in English.
Her mind had very
limited content to work with − memories of the few things she
could touch with
her fingers and what she had been able to read. "Yet she found
life as
intensely absorbing as anyone else does." From her example,
William James
concluded "that the relations among things are far more
interesting and important
than the things themselves." James wrote "All sorts of terms can
transport
the mind with equal delight, provided they be woven into equally
massive and
far-reaching schemes and systems of relationship. The schemes and
the systems are
what the mind finds interesting."
James believed
that there are many "realities" in the universe, and "that we
sense relations as much as we sense things." And, according to
Menand, Bridgman
insisted that she had a "sense of think." To her, thinking was "as
immediate and spontaneous as sight or touch... It's the way we
weave the
sensuous tapestry of the world. From a cosmic point of view, all
minds are
pathetically underpopulated. We somehow intuit a world from a tiny
sample of
what is out there − not as tiny as Laura Bridgman's but possibly
not as great
as we would like to imagine, either."
Someone on Twitter asked: "Would
you rather speak all languages or be able to speak to all
animals?"
That made me realize that there is no reason to presume that all
animals speak the same
language or that all dogs speak the same language or that all
dogs of the same breed
speak the same language. In fact, language is independent of
physical
characteristics.
I'm
having a word-finding problem that doesn't seem to be aphasia
and doesn't seem
related to Freud's ideas about forgetting. I think one word and
type a
different complete word, not a typo.
I've started
making a list of such instances, trying to make sense of it and
learn to cope
with it:
·
logical becomes local
·
front becomes from
·
attended becomes attending
·
when becomes win
·
since becomes when
·
woke becomes work
·
booths become books
·
made becomes meant
·
wide becomes wild
Have you ever heard of such a problem? Is
there a name
for it?
After his stroke,
my Dad couldn't speak. A few years later, he was unable to
swallow.
At first, the brain damage hadn't affected his
ability to
swallow. But after four years of not speaking, the muscles of his
throat weakened
and atrophied, and there was nerve deterioration as well.
That
observation led me to wonder if speech might be a secondary rather
than a
primary evolutionary development.
Making noises
with the throat may exercise muscles needed for swallowing. It is
possible that
the ability and desire to make sounds through the throat evolved
because strong
throat muscles are necessary for eating and drinking. And once the
ability to
generate a wide range of sounds had evolved, that capability could
be used for
communication, which further improved survivability.
In the beginning
was the need to eat and drink. The Word came later.
Consider the evolutionary
value of the beer-belly gut. Your metabolism changes as you get
older, such
that you ten to get fatter even if you continue to eat and
exercise as you did
before. That means you become less attractive to women, and hence
less likely
to stray from your mate. In other words, your physical
deterioration makes it easier
for you to shift your focus from mating to caring for your family,
with obvious
survival benefits for your off-spring.
Also consider
the evolutionary value of snoring, which warns away predators at
night and
which keeps the snorer's partner awake so the partner can keep an
eye out for
predators and enemies.
And consider the
survival value of physical discomfort. Your arms are short and
their flexibility
is limited. That means you can't scratch your own back, which
means you need
someone to scratch it for you. Depending on others to help you and
them
depending on you to helps builds social relationships which are
important for survival.
And, of course,
human babies are born helpless. The more helpless the better,
because the
stronger the parent-child bond that builds.
In the past,
war had evolutionary benefits, spreading both genes and ideas. But
thanks to advances
in transportation and communications technology, the Internet and
cellphones, ideas
and genes now spread and mix globally without war.
War forced
people to migrate either as attackers or victims. Without war,
people might
have stayed put from one generation to the next, with little
contact even
between neighboring villages. War led to interbreeding as opposed
to in-breeding,
which meant less susceptibility to illness
and genetic defects due to commonality of genes. And,
without the mixing
and churning and frantic competition of populations at war, there
would have been
less development and spreading of ideas.
In other words,
war resulted in benefits for mankind like the benefits of
cross-pollinate and
spreading of seeds do for plants.
Mankind evolved
when war was necessary and although war no longer benefits human
development, it
could be many years before our impulse for it atrophies.
But meanwhile,
wars may become less frequent, less intense, and less costly, as
the urge to
war no longer has a basis in evolutionary necessity.
According to the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, the
universe and any closed system within the universe perpetually
moves toward
greater disorder. But I battle disorder every
day - organizing
books, straightening my apartment, adding order to my physical
world. So I question
the credibility of that law.
Perhaps
order is in the eye of the beholder.
According
to chaos theory, complex and apparently random physical
phenomena, such as weather
and ocean currents, exhibit complex patterns which computer
analysis can reveal.
And to the mind of a teenager, the chaos of an apparently messy
bedroom may have
a fundamental organization.
Perhaps
the universe as a whole, when seen from a different perspective,
may have a deeper
more complex order that we have not yet recognized. The universe
may have an inherent
tendency toward greater order, counterbalancing the increasing
disorder that
scientists now observe.
My
idea of order need not be the same as someone else's idea of
order. And maybe
both entropy and order are subjective illusions.
Our ability to
perceive and to process what we have perceived includes
vulnerability to
illusions. We can enjoy movies because we interpret a series of
still frames as
continuous motion. Is that ability accidental? Beings with the
ability to enjoy
movies probably have an evolutionary advantage − they'll be
happier and hence be
more likely to live longer :-)
Perhaps reality is discontinuous even near-at-hand
and at human
scale, but we don't notice because of how we automatically smooth
over the little
gaps in time. I can imagine that more than one reality could
co-exist in the
same time and space, one in the gaps of the other.
The island of Maui in Hawaii was
named for a goddess of that same name. Before Europeans
arrived in that part of
the world, that goddess and her legend were also known a
thousand miles south
in the Samoan Islands, and hundreds of miles south of that in
the Tonga Islands
and nearly a thousand miles south of that in New Zealand. Back
then, the only
way to travel long distances in the South Pacific was by
out-rigger canoe. For the
legend of Maui to have spread thousands of miles, people must
have travelled
that distance in canoes through the open ocean, where on a
clear day waves can
be ten feet high, and on a stormy day the waves can be
horrendous.
They had no navigational instruments.
So how could they have known where they were and where they
were going?
And in the open ocean, because of
the curvature of the Earth, they could only see a few miles to
the horizon.
Imagine the faith and courage it
would have taken to row a canoe in the open ocean − with no
land in sight and
no assurance that you would ever reach land − for weeks or
even months.
Then imagine a simpler explanation. Instead
of hundreds or thousands of people with primitive technology
making that trek over
the course of hundreds of years, imagine an extraterrestrial
making a few stops
on South Pacific islands and retelling the same story of Maui.
In a given
territory there are a finite number of niches in which living
creatures can thrive.
Species compete and survive and evolve in those niches. Once a
species has adapted
to the point where it thrives in a particular niche and dominates
there, no
other life form will have an opportunity to adapt and evolve
there.
Nature doesn't
tend toward perfection. The first good approximation fills the
niche.
Likewise, in a given social or political or cultural climate,
ideas and beliefs and
their physical manifestations such as inventions, sacred books,
means for
communicating and recording ideas survive and evolve in a finite
number of
niches. If slaves could do manual labor, there was no need to
develop machinery
to do it. If the abacus was good enough for everyday calculations,
there was no
need to develop mathematics.
When the niches
in a particular social structure are full, there is no opportunity
for new
ideas or new technology to evolve until catastrophic events break
the structure
into pieces. Then, over time, the pieces coalesce in new patterns,
with new
empty niches to be filled, often inspired by fragments remaining
from the previous
structure, and opening the opportunity for new creativity and
technological
advancement, until the new set of niches is filled.
Today, global transportation
and communication are leading to the breakup of what once had been
isolated and
stable social structures. And the societies that fostered the
evolution of the
technology that made that happen are in turmoil, changing
unpredictably due to
tectonic shifts in economies and ways of life. Desperate masses of
people with
no home and no jobs or low-paying jobs and no role in society and
no sense that
their effort/work/creativity can provide them with a livelihood
are likely to trigger
a global breakup of social and economic structures.
Over time the
pieces will coalesce, and new ideas/beliefs/technology will evolve
from the
wreckage, inspired by remaining fragments of the previous stage,
perhaps
forming many separate, isolated, local structures, as in the past;
or, if the infrastructure
that supports global communication and transportation survives
this upheaval,
the new structure will be global, with a multitude of new niches
to be filled
with an unprecedented surge of creativity, leading to a new stable
global social
structure.
By the time of
Archimedes, the ancient Greek/Roman world had remarkable
mechanical know-how.
What prevented them from developing steam, electrical, and
internal combustion
engines? Perhaps slavery. If necessity is the mother of invention,
where there
is no necessity, invention does not take place. Whatever they
needed to do, they
had cheap energy readily available in the form of slaves. Hence
there was no
need to develop alternative forms of energy. The Industrial
Revolution in England
and then in New England coincided with the abolition of slavery.
and industrialization
could not happen in the South until it, too, abandoned slavery.
Near the end of
the movie The Day After Tomorrow we learn that a new Ice Age,
ironically triggered
by global warming, is likely to last a long time because the new
ice cover over
the Northern Hemisphere will reflect sunlight. If such a disaster
should strike,
one way of reversing that process would be to color the ice,
preferably black.
That effort could take a long time and could be costly, but the
resulting black
ice would absorb rather than reflect sunlight, and hence would
lead to the ice
melting.
Hurricane Dorian was devastating to
the Bahamas. That event brought home clearly the consequences of
global warming − rising seas and
more frequent and violent hurricanes.
So should we put all of our energy
into fix-it stop-gap
measures, helping
the survivors
to rebuild or to relocate? Or might there be
something
we could do to
make such events less likely and less
severe?
I'm reminded of the movie
The Day After
Tomorrow. At the beginning, an increase of a couple of degrees in the
ocean temperature
changes the
course of the Gulf Stream
and very quickly that
global warming leads
to its opposite − a new ice
age. In the movie
that ice age is likely to last a long time because the ice will reflect sunlight, making the world even
colder. When I saw that, my immediate reaction was
that in such an
eventuality, we should color the ice, preferably
black, so it would absorb rather than reflect sunlight, and hence would lead
to the ice
melting.
Now, trying to come
up with a solution to the problem
of the
Bahamas, it
occurs to me that we need the opposite effect − we need a
way to lower the temperature of the
oceans. Of course, the efforts to reduce
greenhouse gases, but those
take
coordinated effort by many governments and many
well-meaning individuals and
take a long
time to have significant
effect. Why not come up
with a way to reflect
the
light of the sun better
than the surface
of the
ocean
does? And why not focus on the
Bahamas first, because of the clear and urgent danger there, and if the
effort there
works, do likewise
elsewhere?
Imagine thin inexpensive highly-reflective material, such as mylar, stretched
across frames
of hollow plastic tubing.
Deploy hundreds or thousands of these
units, floating on the ocean
surface to the west
and south of the Bahamas,
each anchored by cable to
the ocean bottom. They can rise in response to strong
wind and waves but
stay in place. The distribution
of
the units
could/should
be random,
not all close to one
another, and
not in
a preordained pattern. The aim is to reflect
enough
sunlight to locally lower the temperature of
the ocean
by a couple degrees. Units could be added or removed
to fine-tune the effect. And
the hope is that the temperature
differential of the water would help alter the path and/or
reduce the
intensity
of
storms heading toward the
Bahamas.
If that proves
effective,
a similar approach could be
tried on a larger scale, to help reverse global warming.
NB − I am not
an oceanographer. I have no technical skills that could be applied
in such a
project and no money to fund it. I'm hoping that people with the
necessary
skills and resources might find this idea intriguing enough to
explore and refine.
Have
you ever seen or heard of a little green mammal?
Why
not?
In
biospheres with lots of grass and leaves, we find green reptiles
and green
birds, but no green mammals.
If
color is a survival factor for reptiles and birds, why not for
mammals? Of all the
species of mammals, wouldn't you expect at least one to take
that niche?
It's
easy to use Darwinian truisms to explain the color or structure
of any creature
after the fact. But what about the capabilities and the colors
that by the same
logic should exist, but don't?
Mammals
evolved from reptiles and many reptiles are green, presumably
because of the
survival value of that color in many environmental niches. It
would not have
taken mutations for there to be green mammals. Rather, all that
was needed was for
one or more species to keep their green skin color and continue
benefitting from
that color. Why didn't that happen?
Supposedly
life began in the sea, with fish, reptiles, and amphibians.
Then some
reptiles and amphibians moved onto solid ground; and some of
those reptiles
became dinosaurs; and some of those dinosaurs evolved into
birds; and other
reptiles evolved to mammals. Or at least that's the usual
high-school-level
pitch. We're taught that all animals on earth share DNA/genetic
code; and that
mammals came after reptiles.
If
that is true, then why don't any mammals have green skin, like
snakes and
crocodiles and frogs?
A
believer in Darwin might conclude that the absence of green
mammals suggests
that mammals evolved somewhere where green foliage and green
grass were rare,
if not non-existent. Perhaps not on Earth.
Yesterday, I had
to stop for a hook-and-ladder truck backing into a fire station
garage. A driver
in the cab up front, working in coordination with another driver
at the back
end, maneuvered it into a tight space. The fire truck reminded me
of a huge dinosaur
like a brontosaurus, and it dawned on me that maybe such dinosaurs
were more complex
and intelligent than generally presumed.
I never understood
why archaeologists presumed that brain size correlates with
intelligence in dinosaurs
while at the same time they presume the reverse in the case of
homo sapiens Neanderthals.
Neanderthals had bigger brains._
And why do
scientists presume that large dinosaurs had only one brain?
Wouldn't it be more
practical for such a beast to have two, like a fire truck?
As I recall
from a recent museum visit, tyrannosaurus rex had a large bone
structure between
the legs that didn't seem to have a purpose, except perhaps extra
weight for
balance. Perhaps that bone structure protected a second brain.
Such a beast
might have had a small brain up by the eyes, for visual
pre-processing, and a second,
larger one located near the middle of the body, and well-protected
by bone and
muscle. This reminds me of the evolution of PC design, from single
processor
computers to multi-processor machines, where separate chips
pre-process graphics
and do other functions to speed overall performance.
Why should
that matter?
If such dinosaurs
had greater brain power than generally presumed, that would alter
our notions
of evolution-related progress. And if a two-brained
species could thrive
for millions or tens of millions of years, that would expand the
range of what we
consider to be possible, not just on Earth, but also elsewhere in
the universe.
The body that
each of us has is a rental. You identify with the self or
soul that
temporarily has use of your body and presume that whatever
connection you might
have with a higher purpose is by way of your self or soul.
But your body
also connects you to others and to the physical world; and both
humanity as a
whole and the physical universe have self-regulating mechanisms
that connect you
to whatever higher purpose there may be.
For example, in
H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, invaders from Mars quickly destroy
every human
defense. Then, suddenly, they die. Germs that humans are immune to
from frequent
exposure are new and deadly to the invaders. The biosphere of
Earth, including
germs, serves as a defense system. The entire Earth functions as a
self-regulating system, as a single organism, reminiscent of the
ancient belief
in Gaia, the goddess of Earth who was the Earth itself.
Watching the Tom
Cruise remake of War of the Worlds, a couple of alternative
disaster-movie
plots occurred to me.
In the H.G.
Wells story, the eco-system of Earth operates as a single
organism. The germs
and viruses to which man has built immunity operate as a global
defense system
against invaders from outer space. The sudden death of the
invaders at the end shocks
us into realizing the important defensive role of organisms that
we normally
think of as enemies to our health and well-being.
But the same
mechanism could just as easily work in reverse. When Europeans
first arrived in
America, they were lucky that they didn't die of diseases that
Native Americans
were immune to. Rather, they brought new diseases, like chicken
pox and small
pox that decimated the Natives. Along those lines, a benevolent,
well-meaning
alien species might inadvertently bring with them microbes that
wipe out the
human race.
In another plot
line, the delicate environmental balance of Earth could act as a
defense against
aliens. In The Day After Tomorrow a change of temperature of a few
degrees in
the oceans changes currents which causes cataclysmic climate
changes. Imagine
an alien invasion and resulting total war leading to similar
heating of the oceans
and devastating weather consequences that wipe out the invaders,
while leaving
a handful of humans alive to start afresh − global environmental
collapse as Earth's
defense mechanism.
In still another plot line, aliens might use the
delicate environmental
balance of Earth to their advantage, as a way to destroy mankind,
without the
risks to themselves that would come from war. In this story,
aliens, not man,
are responsible for global warming.
Why presume
that the aliens who might threaten us will be intelligent?
Imagine
intergalactic worm-like creatures − long hollow tubes that swallow
and
assimilate matter that they randomly encounter.
Imagine these
creatures can grow to enormous length, but are narrow, so they are
almost impossible
to see by telescope.
Imagine such a
creature is light sensitive. It detects targets based on reflected
light.
Imagine it could eat its way through Earth.
Imagine if
there's an invasion of Earth by beings from another galaxy, and
the invaders are
the chosen ones of God, and Earth is their promised land.
Congress has been deadlocked for years,
accomplishing little, due to partisan rivalry. Some think term
limits might help
change the way Washington works, but that would take a
Constitutional amendment.
Others look for campaign finance reform, but for every rule
there is a
loophole.
I suggest eliminating the seniority
rules of the House and Senate. Replace those rules with an
equitable non-party
way of establishing committee memberships and chairmanships,
and much of the
bartering of favors would go away, smashing long-established
personal power
bases, and weakening the power of the parties.
Members of Congress could choose which
committees they wanted to be on and membership could be
decided among the
candidates by lot. Chairmen too could be selected by lot and
could stay in the
post no more than a year. As a result, incumbents would no
longer have a huge
advantage over new-comers in elections, leading to shorter
terms. And with no
clear centers of power to focus on, lobbyists would have to
dilute their efforts,
paying more attention to individuals. They would no longer be
motivated to
direct vast sums of money toward particular races. By reducing
the incentive for
corruption, corruption would decline.
How
could we get from here to there? Congress would never make
such a change. The
President doesn't have the authority to do it. A
constitutional amendment could
bring about such a change, but that would never happen because
state legislatures,
which have to ratify amendments, have the same kind of
seniority rules, with
similar entrenched power structures.
But there is a practical solution.
The effect of seniority rules is that
some elected representatives have far more power than others.
If my district
has a freshman congressman or a freshman senator, I am not
fully and equally
represented in Congress.
Hence a group of citizens could
bring a class-action suit against Congress, challenging
seniority rules. Then the
Supreme Court could decide the issue, on the basis of the
principle of one
person one vote.
Contrary to the
intents of the authors of the Constitution, power
has
been shifting from our elected representatives
in the two houses of Congress to
individuals in leadership
positions.
By
Congressional rules and practices rather than based
on the Constitution,
both
the Speaker of the House and the Majority
Leader of the Senate now wield
extraordinary
power.
In particular, with
few exceptions, they
decide which bills are
voted on.
In the case of the
Senate,
the Majority
Leader alone can prevent any nomination to the
courts or the cabinet
from
ever coming to
a
vote. In the case of the House, the Speaker can prevent any
appropriation
bill from ever coming to a vote.
When the two
parties work together, civilly, to arrive at compromises satisfactory
to both, this
shift
of power has minimal effect. But in the
current partisan
atmosphere, these
two people stand
in the way of individual
members of the
House and Senate
exercising their
rights and
responsibilities
by voting
on
legislation and nominations
based
on their knowledge
and
convictions as well
as the
interests of
their constituents.
Several
inequities need to be dealt with
promptly:
1) When a bill
is passed by one house of Congress, it should be
debated and voted upon,
promptly, in the other
House.
2) When a bill is entered in either House with the endorsement of at
least
a third of the membership of that House,
said bill should be debated and voted on
promptly.
3) When the
President makes a nomination which
requires confirmation by the
Senate, that nominee should
go through hearings and be voted upon
promptly.
4) When the
President introduces legislation
both houses of Congress should debate and vote upon it.
The Speaker
and the Majority Leader should not
be able to block such votes and
related debate.
Limiting
the power of the Speaker and the Majority Leader would restore power
to individual members of
Congress and individual Senators,
giving
them the
opportunity vote and to be heard,
rather than being
reduced
to the role of mere
tokens
in partisan
two-party
battles. And increasing the power of
individual
members would enable
the
houses
of Congress to
fulfill their
Constitutionally
mandated role of
overseeing and
checking the
actions of the
Executive.
Given the present power structure,
it would be impossible for Congress itself to
make such
changes. Any such measure, whether a bill
or a constitutional
amendment, would never
come to a vote.
But as this problem arises from abuse and
perversion of the Constitution, the courts should be
able to apply the remedy. Such a challenge should focus
on the rights and responsibilities of
individual members
of
Congress and Senators,
restoring to them the
ability to stand up
and be counted, to
vote on measures important to them and to their constituents. The current
rules and practices
disenfranchise them, which in effect disenfranchises the
voters who
support them.
(written 11/28/2019)
Many people
presume that the most memorable sentence from the Declaration of
Independence
is embodied in the Constitution. It is not, but it should be, as a
long-overdue
amendment.
"We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The
founding fathers could not agree on including this sentence in the
Constitution.
To make up for that, they later passed the Bill of Rights, as
amendments. But
those amendments were far more limited than that one bold
statement in the
Declaration of Independence. Can we do any better today?
The concepts expressed in that
sentence could help guide Supreme Court decisions on important
issues.
Of course, the
words would need to be fine-tuned for clarification and to make
them consistent
with current-day beliefs and parlance, for instance −
There is no need
to say "We hold these truths to be
self-evident"
·
Delete "by their Creator,"
likewise to
avoid the religion issue.
The sentence
would then read: "All people are equal under the law. They are
endowed
with certain unalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty
and the
pursuit of happiness."
This sweeping statement would then need some
further detail to
make clear that the right to liberty and also the right to life
could be
abridged as punishment for crimes, that one person's pursuit of
happiness may
not be detrimental to the rights of others, and to define who is a
citizen.
In this contentious, polarized time, can we find a
way to embed
that basic statement of rights in our Constitution, for the
benefit and
protection of future generations?
If the
president dies or is removed from office or is incapacitated, the
vice
president becomes president. Otherwise, the vice president has
very little to
do. He can preside over the Senate and cast the deciding vote in
case of a tie.
But he has no other official duty.
Frequently,
former vice presidents run for president. But typically while
serving as vice
president they do not gain the kind of experience that would make
them good
candidates for president. And former vice presidents have rarely
won presidential
elections.
The post often seems like forced retirement. A
capable and
well-known politician is chosen as a running mate because he might
help the
ticket win some state or block of voters. Then he or she cools his
or her heels
until the top job becomes open or until he or she can run for
president.
In the United
Kingdom, the prime minister governs and the queen or king takes
care of
ceremonial appearances. In the U.S. the vice president does some
ceremonial
filling in but does not have status anywhere near equal to the
president. Sending
the vice president on a diplomatic or good-will mission means far
less than the
president appearing in person.
In recent
history there was one interesting exception. Because of the
personal
relationship between Dick Cheney and George Bush, Cheney played a
major role in
decision-making. While I did not agree with many of the decisions
that duo
made, I found their division of labor intriguing and promising.
Because of his
age, Cheney was not aiming to run for president himself. And
because of his previous
experience, he had greater understanding of the workings of
government and the
complexities of foreign affairs than did Bush. That they
effectively shared
power had nothing to do with the Constitution. It happened solely
at the will
of Bush.
In today's
world, the job of president is enormous, far more complex than any
individual
can effectively deal with. The best presidents choose excellent
advisers and
cabinet members and delegate authority rather than depending on
their own knowledge
and judgement. Bush seems to have elevated this style to a new
level, sharing
the power and the burdens of the office of president with his vice
president, apparently
without the rivalry that often arises from the sharing of power.
And if
anything had happened to Bush, Cheney would have been ready to
govern on his
own, immediately, without an extended learning period, which could
be dangerous
in time of crisis.
I hope that
future candidates for president will be wise enough, confident
enough, and humble
enough to choose more experienced running mates who can serve as
mentors, and
whom they can rely on to share the presidency with them from day
one, rather
than simply waiting in the wings.
In the US, the
process of making laws is long and complicated. It typically
involves public
hearings, committee meetings and approval, open debate in the
House and the Senate,
passage by both the House and the Senate, the signature of the
President, and,
in case of legal challenge, approval by federal courts, up to the
Supreme
Court.
If a piece of legislation
is important to you or those you know, the issue seems clear and
the process
feels broken. You want immediate action, and instead it takes
months or years
before anything happens, and the resultant law is often a
compromise, rather
than the measure that you were hoping for.
Originally,
the electors who voted for president and vice president were
selected by state
legislatures, rather than directly by the citizenry. That was
later modified so
the selection of electors was determined by popular vote. Perhaps
now a similar
change should make the approval of legislation a matter of popular
vote.
With the
universal availability of the Internet and smart phones, it would
be possible
to bypass representative government and, at least in some cases,
substitute
direct referendum, as a clearer reflection of the will of the
people, as true democracy.
But referenda
appeal to the emotional mob response of the uninformed public. And
with referenda
only one specific version of a measure is presented for vote,
without the
opportunity for amendments or compromise. That process puts the
true legislative
power in the hands of those who write the specific words that the
public votes
on, which makes referenda a popular tool of dictators seeking to
create the
illusion of public support and democratic process.
While the Constitution was written in a different
era when
communication was slow and direct referenda were impossible, the
principle of
representative government is still important. Theoretically, the
public elects individuals
whose judgment they trust, and those representatives strive to
understand
complex issues and arrive at agreement with other wise and
rational
representatives from other regions and constituencies. The lengthy
multi-staged
discussion provides opportunities for all opinions to be expressed
and weighed
and for the wording to be fine-tuned many times. Delay forces
rumination and compromise,
which are essential for democracy.
(An Open
Letter sent to Rand Paul and Elizabeth Warren, November 15,
2014)
Please
consider filing a suit under the Freedom of Information Act for
release to you
of information about you collected and stored as part of the
PRISM program.
No information was
specifically gathered
about you pursuant to an issue related to national security. And
while the
entire database is a matter of national security, your small
piece of that is
not.
Also,
the information you would be seeking is for your use and only
your use. That means
that release of the information to you does not constitute a
breach of your
privacy.
You
should file such a suit:
1) to determine what is in fact
being
collected, to better enable you to make appropriate judgments in
your oversight
role as senator; and
2) to set a precedent for
personal access to
PRISM data.
At
this point it is impossible to do away with PRISM. But the data
so gathered
might prove useful to innocent people whose privacy rights have
been violated.
Individuals should be able to
periodically
access their own information:
1) As a way to verify that the
information is
correct, rather than a result of mistaken identity or
misinterpretation. This
kind of access to information about oneself stored in PRISM
would be like
mandated access to one's credit reports.
2) As a tool in uncovering and
dealing with
instances of identity theft.
3) As a source of evidence for
the defense in
criminal and civil trials to establish facts, as well as state
of mind.
4) As a source of raw data that
could be used
as input in personal profile software, to help you build a
predictive model of
yourself, so you can better understand your own preferences and
behavior
patterns; giving you a better idea of who you are and hence
giving you better control
over your own life.
If
individuals had that kind of access to their own data, they
could come to see
such data collection as having positive benefits that, in part,
counterbalance
the loss of privacy.
(Written
October 17, 2014. That particular protest is now ancient
history, but the
approach suggested here could prove effective in similar
circumstances both in
Hong Kong and elsewhere in the future.)
You
have captured the attention of worldwide media.
You
have won the sympathy of billions of people worldwide.
Now
it is time for you to give your well-wishers a way to help you.
Pick
a high-profile global Chinese company, preferably one dependent
on exports and
owned, at least in part, by the Chinese government.
Declare
a worldwide boycott on that company's products.
If
after two weeks the Chinese government does not grant you the
guarantees of
democracy that you require, call for a sell-off of that
company's stock and
expand the boycott to include one or more of that company's
largest business
partners.
If
there has been no progress two weeks later, expand the boycott
to a second
major Chinese company, with the same pattern of escalation.
Continue
adding companies to the boycott — one Chinese company and one
trading partner of
such a company each month until your demands are met.
Such
an approach could be far more effective than slowing traffic in
Hong Kong.
With
that approach, you ally yourself with billions of people
worldwide.
With
that approach, if the Chinese government cracks down and arrests
you or even
worse deals with you violently as in Tiananmen Square, the
worldwide boycott
effort will continue and grow until the Chinese government is
forced to surrender
to your demands.
May
the Force be with you.
We
need to encourage more volunteerism. There are many kinds of
work that need to
be done but don't get done because it would be too costly for
government or for
charities to pay for it. And there are many people who are
unemployed who could
help and would want to help if there were some tangible benefit
for doing so.
Redefine
national
service to
include volunteer work for charities. The more national service
you do, the more
you receive in tax credits, and you can choose when to exercise
those credits.
For
instance, if you are unemployed for six months and do volunteer
work during
that time, you could cash in those credits after you find a new
job and have a
significant tax bill. If you do volunteer work while employed
you might want to
use your credits immediately. And if you choose a national
service career. such
as serving in the military, you might want to save up credits
for use after
retirement.
With
such a system in place, current charities might flourish and
extend their
services, and new charitable organizations would be formed to do
more work that
really needs to be done.
Celebrating
the British Open and the retirement of Jack Nicklaus, the Bank of
Scotland issued
five-pound notes with the picture of Nicklaus, and tourists,
collectors, and
golf fans rushed to buy them. Meanwhile the US Post Office through
www.stamps.com
let's you, for a premium price, design your own
officially-approved postage
stamps, for instance, with photos of your kids.
Congress
should consider putting the images on US currency up for bid, as
an alternative
way to raise revenue and reduce taxes.
They could start
with pennies. It now costs one and half cents to mint a penny. In
other words,
the government loses money making pennies, and it is likely that
pennies will
be eliminated in the near future. Instead of that, the government
could sell
advertising, stamping on pennies a company logo and/or the image
of a billionaire
instead instead of Lincoln and the Lincoln Memorial.
From there, the
project could be expanded to include all coins and paper currency
as well.
Imagine an annual on-line auction for each
denomination.
Imagine all the wealthy people who might want to see their picture
on the $1
bill, and might be willing to pay millions for that ubiquitous
honor.
Corporations already pay tens of millions of dollars for the
naming rights to
the stadiums of professional sports teams. How much more might
they be willing
to spend to have their corporate logo and tag line on US currency?
Or imagine
fans of a rock star or movie/TV star or super model or sports hero
willing to
do class-action bidding for the personality/image of their
choice − combining
millions of small bids automatically online, like voting for
baseball all-stars
or for winners of American Idol.
If you could
raise billions of dollars that way, every year, why not? And as a
result, the currency
itself could become stronger in foreign markets than it is today,
simply from collectors
taking millions of dollars in bills out of circulation.
And if that that
project works, that would psychologically prepare us for
advertising on
military uniforms, tanks, planes, as well as on government
buildings and historic
monuments. Then we would be well on our way to free-enterprise,
tax-free
Nirvana. Hallelujah!
As late as
April 15, you can make last minute contributions to your IRA, SEP
and other
retirement funds that count for your previous year's taxes. That
means that you
can use tax preparation programs like TurboTax to maximize your
contribution
and minimize your tax.
Why not allow charitable contributions on the same
basis? Then
you could decide how much you would like to contribute with full
knowledge of
your tax situation, rather than guessing at the end of the
calendar year. Such programs
could then prompt you with suggestions of reliable charities
dedicated to the
kinds of activities that you want to support, and help you make
the desired contributions
online.
When you walk
out of Grand Central Station, you are immediately greeted by
panhandlers with
heart-wrenching stories on signs and pathetic, sympathetic facial
expressions. They
are almost always individuals, the majority claiming that they are
veterans,
but women as well, some of them pregnant.
On the streets
of Paris, the panhandlers are usually families, including small
kids,
purporting to be refugees, sitting on a blankets, with what may be
all their
belongings near at hand.
It's a
worldwide problem, and probably always has been.
Most passersby,
if they knew these tales were real, would give generously. But how
can you tell
what is true and what is fiction? Maybe you give loose change on
the spur of
the moment. But there is always the lingering doubt − are you
being suckered,
or could this be a variant of the situation in Slumdog Millionaire
and in Oliver
Twist and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where beggars are
systematically
exploited, and sometimes children are deliberately mutilated to
make them look
more pathetic.
I'm a bit of a
Dagwood, the cartoon character who frequently said "There ought to
be a
law." I can't help but think of what might be done change things
for the
better.
Might the
omnipresence of cellphones help?
Imagine a program
for certifying panhandlers, perhaps run by homeless shelters, and
sponsored by corporations.
When the administrators are convinced that someone is truly in
need, that
person is assigned a bar code which he or she can display. With a
cellphone app,
a passerby can scan that barcode and immediately make a donation,
by credit
card or by PayPal, that gets credited to the account of that
particular
panhandler. The donor might be able to see a quick description of
what this
person needs and why and what he or she has already collected
toward that goal.
And sponsoring corporations could choose to match donations up to
some preset
limit. The money and/or credits could be collected by the
panhandlers at the
same shelters that do the certification.
Would anyone
like to make some variant of this a reality?
We
have grown accustomed to thinking of the U.S. as a melting pot,
with people from many
different cultural backgrounds. But the same is true of other
countries around
the world. Many people feel a dissociation between their
cultural identity and
the political entity that rules the geographic area where they
happen to live. This
dissociation leads to feelings of isolation, of being
out-siders, of not belonging.
Where cultural minorities are large enough, that can lead to
political unrest,
rebellion, and civil war.
We
increasingly find ourselves with two intertwined identities −
the bonds that
arise from where we happen to be physically located and the
bonds that arise from
cultural background and belief. Now that the Internet reaches
all countries and
is available to the many, rather than just the elite few, it is
time to consider
the opportunities this communications capability opens, not just
for increasing
mutual understanding and building virtual culture-based
communities, but also
for changing our concepts of what constitutes a government and
what it's role
should be.
One
possibility would be to recognize cultural citizenship in addition to geographic
citizenship. I was born in
the United States and live here and pay taxes here and vote
here. But I may
feel I have a cultural identity that is German or Irish or
Scottish or Italian.
Someone who lives in Israel may feel cultural allegiance to
Judaism or to the Arabic
world.
Consider
the possibilities. For instance, say that you have the
opportunity to declare your
cultural
citizenship.
Then say that some part of the taxes collected from you goes to
support an organizational
entity devoted to your chosen culture, and you have the right to
vote to determine
the leadership and direction of that cultural entity. Then in a
country with
many cultures, no single culture would be the winner and
all the others losers or minorities.
Everyone, regardless
of where you live, would belong to the culture of your choice
and could
contribute toward the preservation of its traditions and help
decide the direction
of its future development.
This virtual, cultural
citizenship need not be
limited to national or religious or other pre-existing cultures.
People should
be able to belong to whatever cultural entities they wish,
including newly created
ones, based on common interests. And cultural citizenship need
not be all-or-nothing.
Imagine you could, for example, choose to be 60% German, 20%
Turkish, 10% Argentinian,
10% Mormon Church. In that case, the taxes and the voting rights
would be similarly
divided.
The
infrastructure and the habits of behavior supported by the
Internet make this
bizarre notion possible. Would it be desirable? How might it
work? And how
might we get from here to there?
(There
will always be dictators, so we need to find better ways of
dealing
with them. The following essay was written in 1998, when Fidel
Castro was still
alive and still ruled Cuba, but the ideas are still relevant.)
Perhaps
Major League Baseball could help put an end to tensions between
the U.S. and
Cuba. Baseball is extremely popular in Cuba, and Castro himself
used to be a
quality player with pro potential before he became a
revolutionary and then
dictator.
Consider
the possibilities if Major League Baseball were to gratis, for
the good of
world peace, offer Castro personal ownership of a major league
franchise for
Havana. The sole condition would be that he retire from
politics. This would in
one swift stroke give Castro a way to step down, gracefully,
without losing
face, give Congress and the President an excuse to re-establish
normal relations,
without losing face, create a firm basis for quickly opening
commerce between
Cuba and the US, with all the multiple business contacts and
opportunities
related to the games, the news coverage, the television rights,
the stadium,
the travel, the visitors/tourists, etc., and provide a common
ground for understanding
between the American people and the Cuban people, through their
enthusiasm for baseball.
Such
a move could not only reduce political tensions, but could also
be the first step
toward establishment of a Caribbean or Latin American League,
which could have equal
status with the American and National Leagues, and have
inter-league play with
the American and National League teams, and participate in the
World Series.
Now consider present issues with Kim
Jong Un of North Korea. What might he want? What might he
consider valuable as
an individual that could become the basis for negotiations for
reducing the possibility
of nuclear war?
Remember his fascination with basketball
and Dennis Rodman. Maybe an NBA franchise would prove
tempting. Or remember the
academy-award-winning move Argo. Maybe Kim Jong Un would be
tempting by the
prospect of starring in a Hollywood blockbuster, perhaps in
the role of a hero
who saves the world from alien invasion.
If you take out a dictator, he gets
replaced by someone else at least as nasty or you leave a
power vacuum. If you
keep piling on economic sanctions, innocent people suffer and
starve.
Consider
unorthodox
solutions that play on the unique and eccentric interests and
tastes of the dictator
in question.
Unlike UPS and
FedEx which the US Postal Service competes with, Postal Service is
required by
law to the entire country, not just the most lucrative markets,
the cities
where the population is concentrated.
It is important
that everybody, including rural customers, continue to be served
and on equal
terms (same price and same frequency of delivery). But the cost of
providing
that universal makes the Postal Service non-competitive.
Make universal
service a requirement for its competitors as well. Require them
either tp serve
everyone, with no surcharge for rural deliveries and with equal
frequency of deliveries,
or to pay subsidies to the US Postal Service, proportional to the
extra costs
it incurs by providing that service.
That approach
could make the Postal Service more financially viable, make the
competitive
playing field among delivery companies more even, and ensure equal
delivery
service for all citizens, regardless of where they live.
Different
kinds of creatures typically live for different periods of time −
some for a
day or less and some for hundreds of years. And while they all
live in the same
world. that world must look very different depending on longevity.
If you only
lived for a day and on that day a hurricane hit, your priorities
would be very
different from the priorities of a creature with a three hundred
year life span
for whom storms seem normal and transient.
In major
issues facing the US, short-term interests often come into
conflict with long-term
interests.
Thanks to the foresight
of the nation's founders, the US Constitution was engineered to
provide a balance
between short-term and long-term interests. The members of the
House of Representatives
serve for two years, the president for four years, senators for
six, and the Supreme
Court for life.
But with
advances in scientific knowledge, long-term consequences of
present-day
decisions become increasingly clear and seem increasingly dire,
and the horizon
of concern to the next election or even the horizon of a lifetime
is not far
enough to properly balance long-term risks.
The way our governng
bodies are now constituted, they cannot be expected to give
sufficient weight
to the long-term, possibly irreversible consequences of their
present-day decisions.
I don't know
how to get from where we are now to where we need to be to achieve
the necessary
far-sighted balance in legislation. But I can imagne a scifi
solution.
I'm reminded
of medieval times when classes were static from one generation to
the next, and
the Three Estates − the
commons, the church and the nobility −
were each represented in government, presenting their competing
points of view
and, in the best of times, striving to arrive at consructive
compromises that
protected the rights and interests of each.
I'm also reminded
of Plato's Republic, where classes were deliberately trained and
brain-washed
from birth for the roles they were destined to play in society,
under the benevolent
protection of the Guardians and under the wise rule of the
Philosopher King.
I'm also reminded
of Brave New World where classes were genetically engineered.
I imagine a time when it is possible to
genetically engineer longevity.
Then it would be medically possible for everyone to live a very
long time, but
that would necessitate reducing the birth rate so as not to lead
to diisastrous
overpopulation. But doing that would make mankind far more
vunerable to
extinction in case of some new dsease or natural disaster.
This techology
would be used insead to create classes distingushed by their
longevity, and the
governing bodies would be based on longevity.
One house of Congress
would consist of people with short lives, who would champion the
needs and concerns
of the mmediate future. Another house of Congress would consist of
people who will
live far longer and are much more concerned about consequences
that would show
up decades or even centuriies in the future. Pehaps there should
be a third house
as well s, to represent the middle ground.
1
When asked as a
child whether I would like to become a doctor since doctors
save lives, I
replied that we all die; doctors just postpone that. What
matters is to have a
reason for living. I wanted to become an author because
authors can help people
realize what they can and should do with their lives.
2
How could
Shakespeare have written so well about the murder of kings?
Was that how he
thought? Should Queen Elizabeth have considered him a threat?
Dostoyevsky
read a newspaper story about a murder and imaginatively
understood how such a
person might think and why such a person might do such things.
He could hear in
his head how such a person might speak and justify himself.
Without ever having
acted in such a way, he could write Crime and Punishment.
The capacity
for understanding people who are very different from ourselves
allows authors
to write and readers to enjoy such stories and allows actors
to portray many
different kinds of characters.
Thanks to this ability
writers, readers, and actors experience multiple lives − not
just the one that
they live. And the insight and empathy gained from those
vicarious experiences
makes their actual experience of life richer and more
complete, bringing them closer
to the people they know and love, because they can more fully
appreciate what
others are feeling and thinking. That's the primary reason why
I write.
Regardless of whether
characters in some way resemble me or people I have known,
what matters to me
is the experience of creating characters who come alive in my
imagination such
that I can hear them speak and see them act in ways that I
would not have
expected.
3
Stories are born,
not made. Some characters and plots come to life, and grow and
change. Others
remain static.
For an author,
the experience of bringing a character to life is similar to
becoming fluent in
a foreign language. When you immerse yourself in a language,
you can reach a
point when you start to dream in it. And when you develop your
characters to a
critical point, you start to dream what they say and what they
do. You hear their
words and see their action, and the story takes on a life of
its own.
3
I write and
read fiction for the enriching experience of living many
times.
Only in the
worst novels do the authors control and manipulate their
characters.
Rather characters come alive and determine their own destiny,
despite the
author's well-meaning plans for them.
Writing such a book is a
delightful adventure of discovery.
6
When I create
characters and scenes, I am performing thought-experiments, a
la Einstein. If I
put these characters together under these circumstances, what
is likely to
happen and why and how does that affect my notions of human
nature and destiny.
That is why I write and enjoy writing, regardless of whether I
ever have an audience.
7
The novels I
write are memoirs of lives I haven't lived yet.
8
There are many
people write because they enjoy the experience of writing, the
sense of
accomplishment they get from finishing a novel, the insights
that gives them.
Many people run marathons and
enjoy doing so even though they have no expectation of ever
winning.
I'm reminded of a book by Jane
Smiley 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel which provides lots of
helpful advice about
the process of writing novels, and conveys much of the
pleasure of just doing
it.
It's great if you have the
temperament and the time to both write and market. But for
many the marketing
is a bridge too far.
Time travel/dislocation
is one tool for the novelist. It is not intended to be
realistic, only plausible.
Used well, it can be very effective.
I begin with
basic unanswerable questions − what, if anything, comes before
life; and what,
if anything, comes after. Add to that the mystery that in some
sense we remain
the same person ro same identity as our body changes radically
over the years.
Normal life is magic − slow magic, the changes happening so
slowly that we
don't notice them until we meet someone we haven't seen in
years or some event
shakes us enough so we see our selves in the mirror with fresh
eyes. When those
same changes happen rapidly, that's fast magic.
In Nevermind, a couple meet,
fall in love, marry, and soon after divorce back during and
shortly after WW
II. By chance they meet agin 40 years later on a cruise ship
and fall for each
other again, before they realize who they are.
In Beyond the Fourth Door, two
people wake up 40 years older than they were when they fall
asleep. They have no
memory of what happened during that 40 years, but to those
around them they
have led normal lives. it isn't a case of amnesia. It happened
to both of them
separately. And it turns out that they had been in love but
had broken up back
in college.
In part 1 of Breeze, a college
girl suddenly goes into a coma and her lover/boyfriend tries
to cope with the
aftermath. In part 2, that same girl wakes up in the body of
Briseis in the
Trojan War −
the story, not the historical Troy. In part 3, she
wakes up at the
Eleusinian Mysteries as part of a mix-up in an attempt at a
kind of deliberate
soul transference.
You could say that those three
novels explore the same mysteries of life from different,
perspectives.
While I don't
put faith in any of the tenets of any religion, my books are
all attempts to
make sense of life and death and the universe.
A point of style
just occurred to me that I wasn't aware of before, having
followed it by instinct,
without being conscious of why.
He is is subtlely but
significantly different from he's. And similarly with
other contractions
of "is".
He's puts the focus on what
follows − adjective, participle of noun. But he is puts the
focus on the fact
of being, as if there could be some doubt, as in he knows who
he is.
She knows it's right. She knows she's going to
the city. The
focus is on what comes after the contraction. She knows it is
right − there was
some doubt. She knows she is going − instead of not going.
The effect of this subtle
difference is cumulative. When it's done right, it feels
right. When it's done
wrong, friction slows the reader down and puts the meaning of
sentences a
little out of focus.
− The first
draft is the cocoon in which the real story matures.
− The
need to write fiction is an incurable disease you are born
with.
− I write
to find out what I think and believe.
− Create characters,
not ideas.
− Thinking
about your book is the real work. Putting it on paper is easy.
− In
rewrite mode − anomalies are opportunities, adding layers to
the narrative.
− Sometimes
a book happens to you − like you are pregnant with it.
− One
measure of the power of an author is how little needs to
happen to show the characters
undergoing enormous life-shifting changes. the best can tell a
story with both
subtlety and passion, where a look or a word has the narrative
power of an earthquake.
By that measure, Penelope Fitzgerald is one of the finest
novelists of all time.
− The
creative phase of writing is very different from the polishing
and editing phase.
− To write
something new or to significantly rewrite, I need to find a generative
phrase − a line that implies a whole character, a whole life;
a line that leads
to another line and another and that generates a rhythm that
carries the story
forward. That's a very different process from analysis and
criticism.
− Sometimes
a good line is a hazard. You can like a line so much that you
keep it, even
though it wrecks the flow of the lines around it and of the
story as a whole.
− The story
is the vessel into which I pour my blood and guts − making
exterior what's
interior, so I can look at it and try to make sense of it.
− In writing,
what is most private and personal is what connects us most
with others, for
that is what we most have in common.
− The aim
is to get to a state of flow in which what matters to
you finds external
expression, and that external expression triggers in others
something
resembling your own internal experience.
Poetry
happens when a
word you would have never expected, turns out to be perfect,
and changes how
you think forever after.
− Definition
of poetry − When words explode in your mind, and that
feels good.
− Our
self-knowledge and our knowledge of others is limited. Every
memoir we write is
fictitious in ways we do not fathom. It is more honest to call
what we write fiction
and to shape the story the way its internal logic demands.
− The
characters appear in your dreams and you write down what
they say and do; then edit and rewrite. It's their book, not
yours. Treat them
with respect and follow their advice.
− Once
your characters come alive, you are always writing − no
matter where you are and no matter what else you might be
doing at the same
time.
− Publication
does not equal success. You have to enjoy writing
for its own sake. Half a million people run in marathons in
the US each year.
Only a couple dozen win. They simply enjoy doing it.
− For me,
when the characters come alive and take charge, and I'm
just along for the ride − that's an author's high: a
wonderful ride.
− When you
begin your novel, the characters are your means for telling
the story. If and
when your characters come alive, the characters become the
story.
− Typically,
I begin with a critical situation and scene. The I hear the
main characters
talking in that scene and from that begin to flesh out who
they are and some of
the scenes and incidents that might have led to that point.
Then I decide on an
opening scene. Then fill in.
− Aim
high. The sky is no limit. Infinity is next to nothing. Just
divide anything by
zero.
− Typos
can be fun in unexpected ways. They
often
lead to puns and sometimes to stories and novels. They are
like random
mutations, some of which win in the struggle for survival. My
writing would be
lifeless without the inspiration of my typos.
− The Tao
of Aphasia. To fight aphasia and memory glitches, empty your
mind and let
thoughts and words enter on their own. The harder you try, the
harder
remembering becomes. The paths, not the memories themselves
wear out. Let your
mind open new paths. Control by not controlling.
−
As I
get older,, I'm
noting an ever widening gap
between what I
intend to do and what I do. I
think about what I
want to do next; then I watch to find out what I actually do. I've
never seen this
phenomenon described in a book.
Someone on
Twitter asked "What is the one theme or question that you find
yourself
exploring over and over again in your stories?"
Here's my
answer −
not one, but six:
1 - free will vs.
determination
2 - meaning and nature
of the soul?
3 - what are you
before birth?
4 - what are you after
death?
5 - what are you after
that?
6 - what are the many
ways by which all
of us, through all of time are connected to one another?
Don't let
yourself be constrained by the limits of your chosen genre.
When you dream
that your daughter is a mother and you a grandmother, write
down what you see
and what that feels like, and see where such a scene takes
you.
Let your
characters tell you which way your story shuld go. And one of
those characters
is the image of yourself that you have created and who now has
a life and a
will of her own.
Fiction
is not just for entertainment. It's also for survival of the
species.
Each of us has the potential
for living many
different kinds of lives, with many different personalities.
When
a group faces a crisis, individuals take on roles that are
necessary for the survival
of the group, with previously hidden potential coming to the
fore. This happens
naturally, like water finding its own level.
In
reading and writing stories, we exercise multiple potential
lives, and vicariously
acquire experience and insight, which could, in crisis,
prove important.
We binge watch.
Why not binge read?
When you change
the context of writing, you change its meaning.
To binge watch
a TV series is to experience a series of episodes as if they
were a single
work, to enjoy them in a new way.
In the old days,
the only choice for watching series was broadcast television.
Typically, 22
episodes constituted a season, and the episodes were broadcast
one per week,
with the time slots for the rest of the year being reruns. It
was a stop-start
experience, often with cliff-hanger stories to encourage
viewers to come back
next week or next year.
The advent of
video recorders changed that experience. You could save
episodes and watch them
whenever your wanted or in a bunch. You could rent or buy. You
were no longer constrained
by the schedule of the network or local station. You could
fast-forward past
commercials. You could pause. You could rewind and rewatch.
You were in control.
Then came cable with video on demand and DVRs,
giving you
similar control even more conveniently. Programming to record
what you wanted
when you wanted was far easier.
Now with streaming, you don't have to plan
ahead. You can at any
moment decide to binge on a series and watch one episode after
another, from
the first episode of the series through the last one, without
commercials.
Watching in that mode, with only the interruptions you want,
you can get deeply
involved in the story and identify with the characters, and
see the actors growing
up and aging − like time-laps photography, watching grass grow
or a flower bloom,
where what normally takes days or months or years unfolds for
you fast enough
for you to perceive and enjoy the spectacle of change. Or you
can choose to
watch in stop-start mode, with breaks as long as you want, to
suit your personal
schedule and lifestyle.
I'm watching
the same content I saw before or could have seen before as
separate episodes. But
seen together, an entire series is a different genre, a
different way of telling
stories and enjoying them.
My favorite
instance of this is Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin, which originally
aired on Showtime
from 2012 to 2014, twenty-five episodes spread across three
seasons. Viewed in
its entirety, it has a beginning, middle, and end. While each
episode is
satisfying in and of itself, the series as a whole is a single
work of art,
deliberately written to be experienced that way.
Typically, graduate students in literature read
in a similar
way. In preparing for orals they are responsible for reading
the complete works
of a set of authors. Rarely do they get the opportunity to
focus on one author
at a time. But they do often come to think of an author's
life's work as a
single work. Today, when E-books are readily available and the
classics are
free, or nearly free, many more people have the opportunity to
have such experiences.
I'm getting warmed
up to write an historical novel set in the time of
Shakespeare. So I decided to
binge read his complete works, one play every day or two.
That's 38 plays, written
over the course of about 19 years. I'm a third of the way
through now, and it
has been a surprisingly delightful experience, prompting me to
want to do the
same with other authors, and also prompting me to rethink what
I write and why.
I'm reading the
Shakespeare plays aloud to get a feel for the rhythm. As I
become familiar with
the vocabulary and the syntax I don't have to go running to
the footnotes all
the time. His langugage begins to feel normal rather than
alien as I become familiar
with stock phrases and images and allusions, as well as the
range of reactions
of characters experiencing love, jealousy, hate, vengeance,
temptation,
ambition. What they are willing to do. What they are willing
to die for. What they
are willing to kill for.
The histories,
in particular. make much more sense read together. The
complexities of
genealogy and royal succession fall into the background as you
become familiar
with them, freeing you to focus on the characters and the
spectacle and the pageant.
Imagine watching the player introductions at an all-star
baseball game when you
know nothing about baseball, or watching the red-carpet
arrivals of celebrities
at the Oscars when you've never heard of the celebrities.
Shakespeare's audience
knew these historical figures, knew about their tangled
relationships, and the
ins and outs of royal succession − at least knew enough about
them to recognize
them as celebrities and to enjoy seeing how they were
portrayed. To them there
was no more surprise in what happened in the plays of Henry VI
than there is in
watching a Christmas pageant at your church, with the stable,
the manger, the
shepherds, and the wise men. And there's pageant − portraying
what is well
known and expected, with pomp and glitter and fine words − in
many other plays
as well.
Now I'm tempted
to binge read the complete works of other authors − of course
the ones like
Balzac and Zola who deliberately set out to tell multi-volume
stories, but
others as well, light weight as well as heavy weight −
Faulkner, Michener,
Somerset Maugham's stories, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective
Agency: sets of books that
gain from being read together, one after the other.
This experience
also makes me think differently about what I write and why I
write.
If I am driven
by what I need to write rather than what an editor wants or
what I guess the
market wants, then, by nature rather than by plan, the pieces
will fit together
and form a coherent story. And, for me, the main purpose of
writing is to
discover that story and tell it.
One of my favorite poems is "In
Just-spring…" by e. e. cummings, which ends:
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloon/Man
whistles
far
and
wee
High-school textbook footnotes connect
"goat-footed" with Pan, a god in Greek mythology. But for so
spontaneous
and natural a poem, that feels like a stretch.
Having recently seen Woody Allen's movie
Midnight in Paris, I read books about Americans in Paris in
the 1920s, and books
by Ernest Hemingway, and I was surprised to learn that e. e.
cummings was in
Paris when Hemingway was there; and in A Moveable Feast I
stumbled on the following
evocation of spring:
"In the spring mornings I would
work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open
wide and the cobbles
of the street were drying after the rain. The sun was drying
the wet faces of the
houses that faced the window. The shops were all shuttered.
The goat-herd came
up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the
floor above us came
out onto the sidewalk with a big pot. The goat-herd chose one
of the heavy-bagged,
black milk-goats and milked her into the pot while his dog
pushed the others onto
the sidewalk. The goats looked around, turning their necks
like sight-seers. The
goat-herd took the money from the woman and thanked her and
went on up the street
piping, and the dog herded the goats on ahead, their horns
bobbing. I went back
to writing and the woman came up the stairs with the goat
milk. She wore her
felt-soled cleaning shoes and I only heard her breathing as
she stopped on the
stairs outside our door and the shutting of her door. She was
the only customer
for goat milk in our building."
Both the poem and the Hemingway passage are evocations of
spring. And, by chance, both Hemingway and cummings were in
Paris at the same time.
So rereading the cummings poem with the Hemingway in mind gives
the words of
the poem new connotations, makes it more tactile and fresh.
I don't know what cummings was
thinking when he wrote it. But thinking of the Hemingway passage
when reading the
poem helps me enjoy it more.
There's a plus as well as a minus to
the reading habits of the young today. Tim, my youngest, has
for more than ten
years been into fanfiction. Those are
stories
written by ordinary fans based on well-known stories and
characters from TV,
movies, and videogames. There are hundreds of thousands if not
millions of fanfics
that you can read for free on the Internet. Many are book
length. The authors
have no intention of ever being paid for this work. They write
for the social-sharing
high of finding an appreciative audience, no matter how small.
For about
half a dozen years, Tim, while in junior high and high school,
read such
stories — the bad as well as the good, for long hours. He's a
fast reader —
polishing off a typical Harry Potter book in less than a day.
He would email the
authors with comments and suggestions for improvements; and
for the best fanfics,
he would ask permission to post the stories at his own site,
and then would
work with the authors to make copy-editing improvements.
Meanwhile, with the rise of ebooks,
far more books are being written and published than ever
before, though many of
them get very few readers if any at all. It costs nothing to
publish an ebook in
the Amazon Kindle store. There are millions of books available
there, and I
believe that the vast majority of those have probably been
written and published
in the last five years.
In
other words, a lot more people are writing and reading than
ever before. Many who
read online for several hours every day have never read and
never heard of the
greatest books that were ever written. But when such people
acquire a taste for
the classics, they can get immediate access to them at very
little cost.
As a publisher of public domain
classic ebooks, my best seller list might surprise you —
Gibbon's Rome, the
20-volume Babylonian Talmud, the complete works of Mark Twain,
each selling for
just 99 cents.
I've been amazed at how closely some
of the fans of classic books read. I got dozens of complaints
that my edition
of Gibbon didn't include the Greek spelling of Greek words in
the footnotes. And
I got a complaint that my edition of Jane Eyre was missing one
word in the penultimate
chapter. Spell check can't detect what's missing, nor could
any proofreader). Some
of my most loyal customers are blind and use technology to
convert the text to
voice. (One of those is a spelunker, exploring caves on her
weekends …
I see no reason to despair. Quite the
contrary.
The cultural climate is chaotic. Schools
no longer drill the western canon into students, as Harold
Bloom decries in his
book of that title. That makes it difficult to build on and to
pass on to future
generations a rich literary context for allusion and enjoyment
and understanding.
But thanks to the Internet, I see broad-based enthusiasm for
story such as the
world has never seen before.
Good things are happening and will happen.
The glass is seven-eighths full. Rejoice! Write those novels
and poems that have
been festering in the back of your mind. Pull the unfinished
ones out of dusty
drawers and finish them. Don't worry about convincing
traditional publishers to
publish them. Publish them as ebooks or post them on a website
of your own. Or
go to Kindle or to PublishDrive and offer them as ebooks.
Encourage friends and
colleagues to read and spread the word. You won't get rich,
but you might find
a few good readers. And what more could any writer ever hope
for?
When
Harold Bloom in The Western Canon detailed
his
selection of the best books of all time, he wrote with love
for the works themselves
and with sorrow that they are no longer getting the attention
they deserve. His
act of defining the canon was a rearguard action. The battle
was lost. He was
in full retreat.
That sorrow resonates with me in
several ways.
One of the main purposes of my fiction
writing has been to try to take part in the dialogue across
the centuries that
the canon represents. I wanted to be someone inspired by the
past and involved in
the present, and someone who would be read and who would
inspire others in the
future.
No such luck. I've always been a spectator
on the sidelines, cheering the team on, but having no effect
on the present, much
less the future.
So now I write and brainstorm and speculate
and converse simply for the pleasure of it. I try to sort out
what matters to
me and why, and what sense it might make, with no expectation
that anyone else
will care; but because it matters to me, because I'd like to
learn to ask better
questions, even if I can't find answers.
My amateur status let's me see connections
where an expert would see only differences. And when, in my
ignorance, pieces
seem to fit together in unexpected ways, I get a manic high
that feels great. I
guess I'm addicted to the process of trying to make sense of
life.
Yes, like
Harold Bloom, I'm sorry that schools have lost the concept of
a literary canon;
and I lament the end of the two-and-a-half-millennium cultural
dialogue that the
canon represents. But on the other hand, I'm encouraged by all
the writing and reading
that is happening outside of schools, and the growth of a
global audience now has
easy access to many works that previously were hard-to-find
and expensive.
The Internet is having an effect on the
world of literature like the fall of Constantinople had in
triggering the Renaissance.
Works that had been locked away are being spread worldwide,
and are being read
voraciously by people who have no sense of a previously
established canon. They
are reading and enjoying and establishing their own sense of
what they should
value and what they want to share with friends and pass on to
future generations.
I tend to be a literary anarchist. I
have faith that if books are readily available, people will
read them and will
tell friends about the ones that matter most to them. I
believe that it can be
good that there is no institutionalized canon.
In the Starcraft game series, the
Zerg are one of the races struggling for dominance. While
there are many Zerg,
they act together, more or less, as a single entity, a single
horde or hive. When
they capture an opponent, they assimilate him or
her, acquiring
new strength, new powers, new perceptions.
Reading books is a bit like that assimilation.
I've been keeping lists of the books
I read and finish since 1958, when I was in the seventh grade.
In those 62 years,
I've read over 3700 books. I'd like to believe that I have
grown through the process,
that thoughts and emotions of authors whose works I have read
have become part
of me and enriched me.
This feels like a variation on Auden's
line in memory of Yeats, "The words of a dead man are modified
in the guts
of the living." Auden meant it ironically. He was writing from
the perspective
of the poet who on death "became his admirers," ceased being
himself.
I'm thinking of that same phenomenon from the perspective of
the reader. In
that sense, as the words of dead men are modified in my guts,
they become part
of me; they nourish me; they give me strength.
In 1944, my Dad was a private in the US Army, stationed
in Georgia — a bugle boy waiting to be shipped to the war in
Europe.
The day before he was due to leave, he received orders
for Officer Candidate School. It turned out that his company was
sent to the Battle
of the Bulge. He heard that they were all captured, without
casualties, and
that the train taking them to prison camp was bombed by the
Allies, and then
there was only one casualty — the bugle boy, the man who
replaced him, died.
Some might
see that as
chance. But to Dad, he owed his life that to other bugle boy. He
had an obligation
to pay it back, to live a life that mattered.
Dad was given a life and also given a belief that he had
a personal destiny.
And at
every decision
point in his life, in the back of his head was the image of that
bugle boy who
had taken his place, a humbling sense of responsibility, a debt
owed.
I'm reminded of the final scene in the movie Saving
Private
Ryan, at Arlington National Cemetery, long after World War II.
The man who was
saved is standing with his children and his grandchildren. Not a
word is said. But
you get the sense that the man's whole life was predicated on
that sacrifice
and that debt.
Fifty years after the war, when Dad had retired as a
superintendent
of schools and a colonel in the Army Reserves, he connected over
the Internet with
a group of veterans from his old company that got captured in
the Battle of the
Bulge. He learned that the bugle boy didn't die, and he got in
touch with him by
email and they shared life experiences.
Then a year later, the officer who took command of that
company soon after Dad left for OCS and before the Bulge chanced
upon Dad's autobiography
on my web site and emailed him a detailed account of what had
actually happened.
In fact, more than half the men in the company died in the
battle.
There was the story that gave Dad a sense of debt and
destiny;
and there are the facts, which were very different.
The story Dad believed for so long mattered more than the
facts, giving shape and meaning to his life − that was a rare
gift and far more
important than mere facts.
(from my
fantasy The
Lizard of Oz, in which an elementary school class on a
field trip goes to
the Underworld. You need to stand under the world to understand
it. There are
many levels of understanding.)
As soon as the class got ashore in the Underworld, Kathy
said, "Why I've never seen such pretty clothes in all my life.
Could you
please teach me how to make clothes like that?"
One of the
three old ladies
who were spinning and sewing said, "As a mother of fact, that
could be
very difficult."
Mr. Carroll introduced them, "These are the Mothers
of Fact: Miss Hap, Miss Fortune, and Miss Take."
Kathy said "I'd like to learn to sew like that?"
"Sew what?" asked Miss Fortune.
"Sew pretty clothes like you're making."
"Those are very special clothes. They're costumes for
our spring fete."
"Fate? What's a fate?" asked Kathy.
"Oh, that's a party. The way we do it, it's a
masquerade party, and everybody wears pretty costumes and acts
out silly parts.
Our job is to make the costumes."
"Can I help? Please? Pretty please?" Kathy pleaded.
"Well, I'm afraid it's probably beyond you; but if you
want to try, here's a needle and thread."
"But what can I use for cloth?"
"Use the fabric of time," answered Miss Fortune.
"That's what we use."
"But ..."
"Once you get into it, it's really quite simple,
nine times easier than regular sewing − just a stitch in time."
Kathy felt silly sitting there with a needle and thread
and
no cloth; but she would have felt even sillier to ask again; so
she just
pretended she was sewing. The other kids gathered round her and
stared.
"What are you doing, Kathy?" asked Mark.
"I'm sewing, silly. Can't you see?" she
answered.
"But you don't have any cloth. How can you sew without
any cloth?" he asked again.
"I'm just stitching time," she said.
Miss Fortune confirmed, "Yes, and she's doing a fine
job of it. She'll soon have it all sewed up."
Miss Hap added, "Why that's lovely, perfectly lovely.
Why that's finer than anything we've ever made. That's a very
special costume.
Fit for a king."
"For an emperor," said Miss Fortune. "That'll
be the emperor's new clothes."
Kathy
wasn't sure
whether they were just being nice, or if they were making fun
of her, or
if they
meant something she didn't understand.
Donny said, "You mean emperors don't wear anything
at all, not even underwear?"
Kathy
giggled and whispered
to Gaynell; and Gaynell giggled and whispered to Kathy.
But Miss Fortune said "There's a very special fiber
for making it visible. Yes, moral fiber. The emperor has to
supply that himself.
It's really indecent for an emperor to go around with no moral
fiber."
Mark asked, "What's moral fiber?"
"Cotton grows on some plants; wool grows on some
animals; and moral fiber grows on some people. They're a rare
breed."
"I'd like to buy some moral fiber," said Kathy.
"Well, you don't see plants buying cotton or animals
buying wool, do you? They've got to grow it themselves. Well,
people can't buy
moral fiber either. They've got to grow it. It grows on you.
Till you're all
grown up."
Mark said, "Well, Miss Osborne's a grownup. She must
have some."
Everybody
looked at Miss
Osborne, and she blushed.
Donny said, "I don't see anything."
Miss Osborne blushed some more.
But Miss Fortune explained, "Just give her time, and
it'll show. Yes, matched with the right time, moral fiber can be
quite beautiful
− bright red and blue and green. Really very becoming. Becoming
even more beautiful."
Freud gave the Oedipus story universal significance as a
model
for the Oepidus complex, a child's unconscious desire for the
opposite-sex parent
and hate for the same-sex parent. Jung similarly adopted the
Electra story as the
model for the Electra complex, a girl's with her mother for her
father. So ancient
Greek myths took on meaning in modern times that had nothing to
do with their origin.
In stories about the kings of Mycenae and Sparta and
about
the kings of Thebes, tension arises between two principles of
succession. These
principles are never explicitly stated in the related works of
literature − the
Iliad, the Oresteia, Electra, and the Oedipus plays − but they
can be extrapolated
from the central conflicts.
Sometimes the throne passes from father to son on the
death of the father. But often it passes instead to next husband
of the queen on
the death of the king or to whoever marries the eldest daughter
of the king,
immediately upon the marriage. Often a reigning king
deliberately delays or
tries to prevent the marriage of his oldest daughter.
For example, Oenomaus, king of Pisa, sets up a chariot
race
between himself and any suitor for the hand of his daughter
Hippodamia, with
death the penalty for defeat. He kills 18 suitors that way
before being defeated
by Pelops, who immediately succeeds to the throne. That chariot
race was the
legendary origin of the Olympic Games. In some variants of this
story, Oenomaus
wanted his daughter for himself, which by this rule of
succession would have
solidified his claim to the throne, with no concern about
incest, which was no
issue for the gods as well.
Similarly, many suitors gather to contend for the hand of
Helen, daughter of Tyndareus, king of Sparta. Yes, she was
reputed to be beautiful,
but she also was the symbol of right to rule Sparta. When she
marries Menelaus,
Menelaus immediately becomes king, even though the previous king
is still alive
and well. And when Paris prince of Troy kidnaps/elopes with/runs
off with Helen,
the matter is treated not just as an instance of adultery.
Rather it is a matter
of state, precipitating war between Troy and all the Greek
states ruled by Helen's
former suitors. Apparently, if she is the symbol of power, loss
of her puts at
doubt the legitimacy of Menelaus' reign.
When Agamemnon assembles an army to help his brother
Menelaus recover his wife and hence his authority, he has to
first deal with the
legitimacy of his own reign. He inherited the throne of Mycenae
from his father
Atreus. But now he has a marriageable daughter, Iphigenia, who
could be
considered the symbol of authority. If Iphigenia should marry,
her husband
would have a claim to the throne. So Agamemnon announces that
his is giving her
to Achilles, his most likely rival, which would be tantamount to
abdicating. But
instead he sacrifices her, eliminating that threat to his
authority.
In variants of that story, Iphigenia is saved by the gods
at the last minute and transported to the distant land of
Tauris, where she serves
as a virgin priestess. Either way, she is no longer
marriageable, and Agamemnon's
right to rule is not at question.
While Agamemnon is away, his wife, Clytemnestra, sister
of Helen, takes Aegisthus, cousin of Agamemnon, as a lover. On
Agamemnon's return,
they murder him, and Aegisthus, marrying Clytemnestra becomes
king. Years later,
Orestes and Electra, children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra kill
their mother
and her lover. Eventually, after killing the son of Aegisthus,
Orestes becomes
king of Mycenae, which can be seen as him asserting his right of
succession, as
son of Agamemnon.
Orestes also marries his cousin Hermione, daughter of
Menelaus and Helen and hence becomes king of Sparta, though
Menelaus is still
alive. That can be seen as succession by marriage to the king's
daughter.
In Thebes, when King Laius dies, his widow Jocasta
becomes
the symbol of power. Oedipus, apparently an indigent stranger,
wins her hand by
solving the riddle of the Sphinx and hence become king. But, as
it turns out, there
is ambiguity in his right to rule, since he unwittingly killed
the old king who
was his father, and he is the heir to the throne by inheritance
as well as by
marriage to his mother.
When Oedipus and Jocasta die, their sons, Polynices and
Eteocles, share rule until war breaks out between them and they
kill one another
(Seven Against Thebes). Then Antigone, as the eldest daughter of
Oedipus, becomes
the key figure in determining legitimacy.
Creon,
brother of Jocasta,
seizes the throne, but by the marriage-based rule of succession,
Antigone is a
threat to him. She is engaged to Creon's son Haemon, and by the
rule −
but not explicitly stated in the play Antigone −
Haemon would become king if and when he married her. Heamon and
Creon come into
conflict. Haemon nearly kills his father but instead kills
himself. Antigone
does not marry, leaving Creon to reign.
You would expect writers in the patrilinear Periclean age
to distort the old stories to conform to patrilinear succession.
Instead, they
scrupulously preserved the tension between succession by the son
and succession
by marriage to the daughter or wife, which puts women and love
and jealousy at
center stage, together with greed and lust for power.
While these stories seem to have originated as examples
of
legal issues related to the right of succession, they were
perpetuated because
of their dramatic potential, rich with complex conflicts and
ambivalent relationships.
No wonder authors have returned to them for inspiration again
and again for
three thousand years. And no wonder Freud and Jung found them
useful in describing
what they concluded from their experience in dealing with 20th
century
psychiatric patients.
In the medieval period, in common belief, the
seasons
changed and people grew up and aged, but human nature and the
nature of the universe
were immutable. Man and heaven and earth were all connected to
one another and to
God. And every man derived meaning from that order. Dante,
Chaucer, Aquinas.
In the Renaissance, as advances in science revealed
mechanical laws governing the physical world, the spotlight
shifted to man himself.
God didn't go away. Rather He was put in parenthesis. Man's
physical body and
his reasoning ability became the focus of learned attention, the
source of man's
dignity and meaning. Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Descartes.
Greater attention led to greater knowledge and
understanding
of the workings of the human body and mind. The spotlight then
shifted, in the
Romantic period, to the realm of non-rational thinking −
intuition, emotion,
poetic sensitivity to Nature. Wordsworth, Coleridge.
Advances
in science then
made Nature seem less mystical, less fraught with meaning, and
the spotlight of
great literature, philosophy, and science moved to the
unconscious, the subconscious,
the irrational. Dostoyevsky, Conrad.
As psychology revealed that the unconscious/subconscious
of the individual was governed by mechanical rules, the focus
shifted away from
man as an individual, to entire cultures and to human
consciousness as a whole.
Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Frazer, Jung, Faulkner.
As science
and philosophy
came to the conclusion that the viewer is part of the physical
system, that
there are limits to what human consciousness can ever
understand, the spotlight
moved again. Literary works celebrated characters who willfully
and heroically
distorted their own perception of the world. Beckett, Sartre in
Nausee,
Camus in L'Etranger, Kesey in Cuckoo's Nest,
Ginsberg in Sunflower
Sutra.
That period abruptly came to an end as it became clear
that
drugs could mechanically produce the same effects.
Over the last sixty years, we have seen numerous serious
works that hint at a realm of order and understanding lurking
behind the everyday
mechanical world. We see that in Pyncheon, Eco, Borges, Lem,
Stoppard, Neal Stephenson.
Sometimes that order echoes the order of the medieval period,
suggesting that
there really is a cosmic order that connects everyone and
everything, but thay is
beyond our understanding.
I suspect that a similar faith in an undefined cosmic
order underlies many of these Lenses.
A friend of
mine bemoans the invention of GPS. Relying on GPS, people lose
their sense of
direction and their ability to use maps. He sees that as an
impoverishment of
our spatial awareness. He also bemoans the availability of the
information
resources of the Internet, because people don't remember facts
when they can
easily look them up. He
hearkens back to
what was lost culturally with the invention of the printing press,
and the
decline in the ability to memorize with the invention of writing.
He sees it as
a moral failing to take the easy path made possible by advances
technology.
My view is
that we are programmed to take advantage of every opportunity to
do more with
less, to not waste effort or memory space unnecessarily, to follow
the path of
least resistance, like water flowing down a hill. When an easier
way to do
something becomes available, we have a strong inclination to adapt
to it and
forget the old way, and that inclination has repeatedly been
important for the
survival and advancement of mankind.
Admittedly,
our increasing dependence on technology puts us at risk if and
when the
electrical and electronic underpinnings of modern civilization
vanish (through such
disasters as solar flares or nuclear war). But if and when that
happens, we'll
adjust again to the new reality and relearn what we need to
relearn. And in the
meantime, we'll advance far more quickly both as individuals and
as a society,
by supplementing our natural abilities with the use of
technological innovations.
Since the
1970s the performance of computer chips has been doubing every
18-24 months.
That means that in two years you will probably be able to buy a
computer with
the same power for half the price, or buy a computer with twice
the power for the
same price. This predictable progress has been driving economic
growth, increases
in productivity, and social change.
The predictability
is due in large part to the relationship of the physical size of a
circuit and
its speed. Electricity moves at the speed of light, which, as
computer pioneer
Grace Hopper often pointed out, means that it travels about a foot
every nanosecond,
a billionth of a second. If you cut the size of a circuit in half,
you double its
speed and hence its performance, without the need for any other
innovation.
In the past, the
use of ever faster, more powerful computers in the design and
manufacturing of
computers has tiime after time made it possible to make the next
generation of still
faster and more powerful computers.
The pace appears
to be slowing as technology reaches physical limits. But major
innovations, like
quantum computing, might keep the trend going for another decade
or more.
So what is the curse? We have experienced
more than 40
years of incredible progress in technology. As individuals, we
have become used
to the consumer electronics products we buy becoming obsolete
quickly. Rather
than fix a broken device, we buy a new more powerful replacement.
We take such progress
for granted. And the economy as a whole depends on it for ever
increasing productivity
and ever lower costs for technology products. When this progress
comes to an
abrupt halt, the repercussions are likely to be disastrous.
A book as artifact
has value like an antique has value, based on its rarity.
A book as content
has value only for the words and what they mean.
Thanks to ebooks,
book-as-artifact has been severed from book-as-content.
Book-as-artifact will be
valued forever, increase astronomically in value as they become
more rare. Ebooks
have no rarity. If one copy exists, millions of copies can
be created instantaneously
and distributed around the globe at little or no cost.
Many of the books
I now republish used to be rare books. Now they will be
readily available
forever, barring the possibility of another Dark Ages, eliminating
the
technology that we now take for granted. Book burnings, a la
Hitler and Savonarola,
are no longer possible in this electronic environment.
When The Iliad
and The Odyssey were first written down, works that had
once existed only
in mind and memory, and that few knew in their entirety and shared
with others
by recitation became generally available. It was tedious and
expensive to make
copies, but it could be done. The artifact nature of written books
made it
possible for books to be passed on from generation to generation,
independent of
faulty human memory. Of course, those artifact books were subject
to wear and destruction.
But there were always people who placed high enough value on the
best to make
fresh copies or to pay others to do so. Of course, there were
mistakes in judgment
and there were natural disasters and human disasters, but many
books survived for
hundreds of years.
Electronic books
free the content from the artifact — like it was before books were
written down.
The book resides in memory once again, only the memory is
electronic instead of
human and mortal. Today, the content of all the literature of the
entire human
race can fit on a backup disk drive you can connect to your PC,
and soon, with
the predictble doubling of computer power, all of literature will
fit on a flash
drive, and then on a gadget as small as an earring, and then will
be available
to all devices everywhere instantaneously from cloud storage.
When Michael Hart founded the Gutenberg Project to
make public
domain books available for free to everone, he compared the
invention of ebooks
to the invention of the printing press. But the change was even
more revolutionary
than that. It was comparable to the invention of writing.
We are bombarded
daily with news of hacking, identity theft, and scams. We see our
nation becoming
ever more divided as people ignore non-partisan balanced reporting
of news and
instead focus on the web sites and cable channels that agree with
their pre-set
biases. The communities of common interest that the Internet made
possible have
become havens for bias and bigotry and closed minedness.
Innovations
developed for one purpose often end up serving the opposite. Fire
can warm and
cook, and it can also burn.
Misuse of the
Internet should not blind us to the Internet's potential.
We are shaped
by our environment, and the Internet and related social meda
constitute a new environment
shaping everyone from toddlers to retirees, enabling new behavior,
new ways to
learn, and new ways for people to interrelate.
The human potential
for the exercise of mass destruction existed before the invention
of the
weapons that made it possible. The potential for people to
submerge their identity
and their individual reason in large-scale crowd hysteria existed
before the
invention of mass communication media.
But now, thanks
to the Internet, we are learning that man also has the potential
for
large-scale reasoned discourse. Thousands or even millions of
people can arrive
at mutual understanding through dialogue. Ideas can be spread
instantaneously in
global forums where they can compete on the basis of their merit,
and people
around the world can work together on large-scale projects, just
as they can
play massively interactive videogames. In other words, the
Internet reveals
positive aspects of human nature that were never seen before.
Before the
Internet, large numbers of people could work together only when
regimented, disciplined,
and controlled by a central authority. Without such control, large
groups of
people were dangerous and volatile, sometimes turning into
irrational mobs. And
mass communication − communication
from one to many − could
induce crowd hysteria at a distance, and one person's nightmare
could be projected
onto many.
By enabling
many to communicate with many, directly, without central control,
the Internet
reveals unexpected human potential for collaboration and
community.
There's always
a good old days. The past is always simpler than the
present, because we
know so little about it. We remember the threads of consequence,
the events
that shaped the world as we know it today. The other stories
become mere anecdotes,
curious unimportant details. And we have no way to reconstruct the
branching
paths of possibility that gave context and meaning to the
circumstances in which
events unfolded. Contemporary daily newspapers hint at the degree
to which, in
the moment, people were unaware of what the outcomes would be and
how future generations
would view or totally ignore the events of that day.
In the present,
we are inundated by everything that is possible − an infinite
number of
possibilities. When we consider the past, the choices and the
challenges seem
so much easier to deal with, not because they were, but because of
our ignorance
of what was at stake then.
The ancient
Greeks also had their good old days. They talked of the
Golden Age,
which came before the Silver Age. And, to them, their present time
− the
time of Pericles and Socrates
and Plato and Sophocles and Euripides and Herodotus − was the Iron Age, a
time of decay.
Many people
presume that today the pace of change is ever-increasing, making
it ever more
stressful for us to adapt. But, in fact, the changes we experience
today are
fine-tuning − adding functions to a smart phone, watching TV shows
and movies
streaming over the Internet instead of broadcast or on DVDs. In
contrast, the
changes that occurred in the 19th and early 20th centuries were
fundamental and
disruptive. The Pony Express lasted just 18 months and then was
made obsolete
by the transcontinental railway. Locomotives, steam ships,
automobiles,
electric lights, telegraph, telephone, radio, photography, sound
recording, movies:
an explosion of inventions radically changed everyday life.
George Washington
was good at trigonometry in school, so he got a job as a surveyor
and was hired
to survey frontier land. Then because he was familiar with that
frontier land,
General Braddock gave him the rank of Colonel in the British Army
and relied on
him to lead the way to Fort Pitt, where they were ambushed and
defeated by the
French and Indians.
Then when the
Revoluton began, the Continental Congress turned to Washington,
with his military
experience and his lofty rank of Colonel, and made him
Commander-in-Chief of
the Continental Army.
With his
unique style of command, Washington won the war, despite losing
every battle but
his last.
You could argue
that if Washington hadn't done so well in trigonometry, we might
have lost the
Revolution.
I didn't just
read this book, I typed it − all 1317 pages of it.
I love fresh
views of historical events written by people who lived at that
time, as opposed
to works written long after, in which the selection of events and
their
presentation are flavored by what happened later − history written
backwards, focusing
on what caused the events and the consequences that
followed − teleological
history where the importance of an event depends on its
relationship to a world
view held much later.
I had read about
Mercy Warren years ago when I wrote a play about her and General
Burgoyne. But
I had never read her history of the American Revolution. The
length was daunting,
and the only available edition of it − a photographic facsimile of
the 1805
edition that I found in the Boston Public Library − was very
difficult to read.
The old style typography − s
looked like f −
combined with the out-dated spelling and punctuation − sentences that ran on
line after line − were hard on the eyes. I could
force myself to decipher a paragraph or so, but then my mind would
wander. Typing
it would force me to concentrate and pay attention to every word.
Why should I want
to pay such close attention? Here was a little-known first-hand
account of the American
Revolution, the events leading up to it, and the circumstances
that followed it.
This was an important work that could impact our image of our
nation's origins
and destiny. I wanted to make it available to all, in readable
understandable
form. And thanks to the Internet, it wouldn't take years or money
or the enthusiastic
support of a well-established publishing company for me to do so.
All I needed
to do was type it − modernizing the typography and punctuation,
and editing for
readability − and I could make it freely available to everyone
through my Web site.
The author was
a woman, writing at a time when it was unheard of for women to
write history
books. Yes, her style was pompous, mimicking the rhythms of
Burke's speeches and
Gibbon's history of Rome, as if that were the standard for serious
history;
and, like Alexander Pope, making generalizations about the nature
of man and
war and politics, rather than providing all the raw data and
first-hand
observations on which she based those conclusions. But her
personal voice comes
through, becoming louder and clearer toward the end of the war,
and virtually
screaming in the volume after that where she expresses her concern
for the
future of the young republic, daring to criticize Washington's
dependence on
his military cronies in his two administrations, and harshly
accusing her life-long
friend, John Adams, of having lost faith in democracy and favoring
monarchy.
She wrote those words in 1801, just after the end of his term as
president. She
wrote those words with the passion of fear − the fear of possible
civil war because
the divide was becoming so great between those who believed in the
principles of
equality clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence, and
those who had a
nostalgic reverence and desire for the aristocratic style, titles,
and pomp of European
courts. She foresaw, with dread, the special status of the
super-rich two
hundred years later.
In her day, the
primary political divide was between those who, like herself,
believed in the
Republic as a moral, even a religious necessity, and those who saw
it as a
temporary expedient. To Mercy, the American experiment in
democracy of the people,
for the people, and by the people was a beacon to the world, the
shining example
that could lead all peoples to free themselves from the tyranny
that kept the
many in misery, poverty, and slavery.
Men like Adams
responded to the French Revolution with fear and loathing, and
from that blood-fest
concluded that democracy was flawed, that it was at best a
temporary solution.
Mercy cites with disdain and disappointment his book Defense
of Their Constitutions
which "drew a doleful picture of the confusion and dissolution of
all
republics." She did not mention the undeclared war which Adams had
waged
on the seas against republican France. She did not mention his
Alien and
Sedition Acts which revoked much of the Bill of Rights,
purportedly for public
safety (in a political atmosphere resembling that of the McCarthy
era 150 years
later). Rather, she focused on what was to her more important and
more insidious
− his love affair with monarchy. It was as if he had taken a
mistress −
monarchy/aristocracy −
while still ostensibly sleeping
with his wife − republicanism/democracy.
She admitted
that Adams was not alone in this betrayal: "It is true the
revolution in France
had not ultimately tended to strengthen the principles of
republicanism in
America. The confusions introduced into that unhappy nation by
their resistance
to despotism and the consequent horrors that spread dismay over
every portion
of their territory have startled some in the United States, who do
not
distinguish between principles and events, and shaken the firmness
of others,
who have fallen off from their primary object and by degrees
returned back to
their former adherence to monarchy. Thus, through real or
pretended fears of similar
results, from the freedom of opinion disseminated through the
United States, dissensions
have originated relative to subjects not known in the Constitution
of the
American Republic. This admits no titles of honor or nobility,
those powerful
springs of human action; and from the rage of acquisition which
has spread far and
wide, it may be apprehended that the possession of wealth will in
a short time
be the only distinction in this young country. By this it may be
feared that
the spirit of avarice will be rendered justifiable in the opinion
of some as
the single road to superiority."
She was reluctant
to attack her old friend, but she felt that it was her moral duty
to do so − not
just to set the record straight, but to alert the young Republic
of the danger
and to help nudge it in the right direction, so it would have a
chance to survive,
to grow, and to thrive in a world dominated by monarchs and
dictators.
"The
veracity of an historian requires that all those who have been
distinguished,
either by their abilities or their elevated rank, should be
exhibited through
every period of public life with impartiality and truth. But the
heart of the
annalist may sometimes be hurt by political deviations which the
pen of the historian
is obliged to record.
"Mr. Adams
was undoubtedly a statesman of penetration and ability; but his
prejudices and
his passions were sometimes too strong for his sagacity and
judgment."
She blamed his
4-5 year sojourn in England, as a diplomat, after the Revolution,
for having led
to this anti-democratic change in his convictions:
"...unfortunately for himself
and his country, he became so enamored of the British Constitution
and the government,
manners, and laws of the nation, that a partiality for monarchy
appeared, which
was inconsistent with his former professions of republicanism....
"After Mr.
Adams's return from England, he was implicated by a large portion
of his countrymen
as having relinquished the republican system and forgotten the
principles of the
American Revolution, which he had advocated for near 20 years."
Ironically,
despite her faith in republicanism, when Mercy waxed religious and
invoked the
name of God, she used paternalistic and monarchic images like the
kingdom of
Christ. Perhaps that's merely because of the familiarity of
such King James'
diction. But perhaps, too, she had not yet worked out if and how
God's kingdom
could in any way be republican.
Mercy wrote
early drafts of this monumental work near the time when the events
unfolded,
and completed it about four years before its appeared in 1805. She
explained
the delay as due to health problems, temporary bouts of blindness,
and grief at
the death of her son.
She wrote in
the third person, trying to avoid personal bias, while advocating
the republicanism
she so ardently believed in. She didn't spare friends like John
Adams, or acquaintances
like John Hancock, or public idols like George Washington. She
called it as she
saw it, shot by shot − good and bad, not expecting people to be
consistent and
predictable. She treated her immediate family with that same
impartiality: her brother
James Otis an early advocate of the rights of the colonies, her
husband James Warren
speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives during the
Revolution,
and her son Winslow Warren the would-be diplomat. The early
chapters provide interesting
details on the steps leading up to the Revolution, particularly
the events
happening in Boston, near her home in Plymouth.
She also, in
Chapter 6, told the little-known tale of the British emancipation
of slaves in
the South. In 1775, Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, freed the
slaves in his
colony and armed them, as a way to intimidate the colonial rebels.
"He [Dunmore]
had the inhumanity early to intimate his designs if opposition ran
high to declare
freedom to the blacks, and, on any appearance of hostile
resistance to the King's
authority to arm them against their masters. Neither the House of
Burgesses nor
the people at large were disposed to recede from their
determinations in
consequence of his threats nor to submit to any authority that
demanded implicit
obedience on pain of devastation and ruin. Irritated by
opposition, too rash
for consideration, too haughty for condescension, and fond of
distinguishing
himself in support of the parliamentary system, Lord Dunmore
dismantled the fort
in Williamsburg, plundered the magazines, threatened to lay the
city in ashes
and depopulate the country: As far as he was able, he executed his
nefarious purposes.
"When his
lordship found the resolution of the House of Burgesses, the
committees and conventions
was nowhere to be shaken, he immediately proclaimed the
emancipation of the
blacks and put arms into their hands. He excited disturbances in
the back settlements
and encouraged the natives bordering on the southern colonies to
rush from the
wilderness and make inroads on the frontiers."
Much of the
military action, including the occupation and then the evacuation
of Boston by
British troops, took place before the Declaration of Independence.
In Chapter 7,
she painted an interesting picture of Washington's genius during
these early
days. He arrived in Boston in the summer of 1775, after the Battle
of Bunker Hill,
to take charge of the rag-tag army of rebels that had assembled.
The Continental
Congress had not yet decided what it wanted to do, whether they
might still be
reconciled with England should the right terms be offered. But
they needed to
organize some kind of defense. So before deciding on independence,
they decided
on a commander-in-chief of their army. Yes, the rebel force was
small and untrained,
facing British veterans. But worst of all, Washington, much to his
surprise, discovered
that he had almost no gunpowder, with just three rounds per
soldier. He kept
that deficiency a secret and, with amazing cool, deployed his
troops building fortifications
on the hills around British-occupied Boston and generally acted as
if he had all
the ammunition he might ever want. If the British had realized the
rebels were so
ill-supplied, they could have wiped out the colonists with the
greatest of ease.
How did he
build up his supplies? The local farmers had a little gunpowder to
spare, and the
southern colonies eventually sent along a little more. The locals
did their best
to tool up to produce gunpowder locally, but that took time. What
made a real
difference was the Continental Congress empowering pirates − privateers
−
to prey on British shipping and
thereby capture whatever military supplies they could. And that
was a year before
the Declaration of Independence.
Better known,
but still often forgotten, the New York militia under General
Montgomery unsuccessfully
invaded Canada in the fall and winter of 1775 − once again long
before the
Declaration of Independence. And, in conjunction with that
invasion, Benedict
Arnold led a thousand troops from the Continental Army near Boston
overland, in
a heroic and almost impossible march through previously
unexplored, mountainous
forest to meet up with Montgomery outside Quebec.
Mercy also painted
an interesting portrait of General Burgoyne. He marched south from
Canada into
northern New York in 1777, with arrogance and confidence, having
boasted that
he could crush this little rebellion with just a handful of
troops. Now with a
large army of seasoned veterans in his command, he expected the
rebels to cower
and run at the mere rumor of his approach. As part of his plan of
terror, he
brought with him and set loose on the American settlements in his
wake, large
numbers of Indians, recruited with promises of plunder. Then
out-maneuvered and
soundly defeated at Saratoga, Burgoyne surrendered his entire army
to General Gates.
Imagine Burgoyne and his troops, totally humiliated, marching as
prisoners over
primitive roads past amazed and staring crowds in all the little
towns from
Saratoga to Boston. And remember the historical context − soldiers
were
expected to and often did act with honor. The British officers
were permitted
to retain their hand arms, as a mark of respect. And the rebels
only guarded
this procession of thousands of prisoners with a small handful of
troops. It
would have been easy for the prisoners to escape and wreak havoc.
But they made
no attempt to do so − they had given their word.
Burgoyne
waited for months in Boston with his troops, expecting that under
the terms of
the treaty they would all be shipped back to England, having given
their word − parole − that
they would never again
take up arms against America. But Congress was hesitant, trusting
the honor of
these soldiers, but not believing that the British government
would follow through
with its obligations under the treaty. Burgoyne himself was
allowed to return
to England, having given his parole; and while in England, he was
stll considered
a "prisoner" subject to negotiations for prisoner exchange. His
troops meanwhile were forced to march once again, this time from
Boston to Virginia.
Burgoyne himself,
while still offically a prisoner, was elected a Member of the
House of Commons,
where, having converted to republicanism, he repeatedly and
eloquently pleaded
the cause of American independence and peace.
Today's school
textbook version of the American Revolution focuses on the
activities of Washington
in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Mercy, in addition to
covering that,
devoted considerable space to events in the south, where General
Gates, the
hero of Saratoga, assumed command of the rebel forces, until his
humiliating defeat
at Camden. Other major players included General Nathaniel Greene,
who took over
from Gates, and General Lincoln. With the devastation in Georgia
and the Carolinas,
with the Loyalists playing a major role, and with the British
increasingly using
a strategy of terror − burning homes, destroying crops, and
sometimes taking no
prisioners, killing everyone − this often reads like the Civil War
that raged
there four-score years later.
As for the Battle
of Yorktown, as described byMercy Warren, that wasn't really a
battle at all.
Cornwallis was maneuvered and pushed back with a series of
skirmishes and was forced
into an impossible geographic position by following orders he had
received from
General Clinton in New York. Then it became a contest of shovels.
The British had
just 400 shovels; the colonists far more. The colonists dug
trenches parallel to
the British earthwork defenses, moved up their cannon and
bombarded. Then they dug
channels leading closer and dug parallel again so they could move
their guns up
again. And so on, while the British, stuck on a narrow peninsula,
blocked on
the land by the combined American and French armies, and on the
sea by the French
fleet, were running out of food and ammunition. Despairing that
his army would
be totally destroyed before promised reinforcements arrived from
Clinton in New
York, Cornwallis surrendered. A few days later Clinton arrived by
sea to find
the Chesapeake firmly in the control of the French fleet and no
British troops
left on the ground. He had no choice but to turn back.
Why the delay in sending reinforcements?
Washington finessed
the British. He made Clinton believe that an attack on New York
was imminent.
Such an attack had been planned. Troops had been massed. Clinton's
spies had
intercepted messages from Washington to that effect. So Washington
let Clinton continue
to believe that. He left skeleton forces in nearby forts, with
orders to playact
as if they were preparing for an attack, while, in fact, unknown
to the British,
Washington marched south all the way to Virginia. Up until a few
days before Washington
reached Yorktown in Virginia, Clinton in New York was frantically
preparing his
defenses and sending messages by sea to Cornwallis ordering him to
send some of
his troops back to New York.
Another reason
for the delay was the slow arrival of a fleet under Lord Digby
with reinforcements
from England. Mercy explains:
"Lord
Digby, however, arrived at New York on September 29. One of the
princes of the
blood −
Prince Henry, the
Duke of Clarence − had taken
this opportunity to visit America, probably with a view of
sovereignty over a
part or the whole of the conquered colonies. This was still
anticipated at the
Court of St. James; and perhaps, in the opinion of the royal
parents, an
American establishment might be very convenient for one of their
numerous progeny."
School textbooks
usually end the war at Yorktown. But nearly a third of Mercy's
narrative covers
the war after Yorktown, together with the negotiations that led to
France,
Spain, and Holland helping the American cause; and the battles
fought by thoe allies
in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Have you ever heard of the Spanish
siege of Gibraltar
as part of the American Revolution? The book also covers political
wrangling in
England; the negotiation of the Treaty of Paris; and the
challenges and risks
facing the fragile, fledgling republic.
Here we read the
story of Henry Laurens, who was president of the Continental
Congress at the time
of passage of the Articles of Confederation. He was sent as
plentipoteniary to
negotiate a treaty of alliance with Holland, which had been, for
many years, an
ally of Britain. His ship was intercepted and overrun by the
British. At the
last moment he threw overboard a trunk containing the secret
correspondence with
sympathizers in Holland, his instructions and letters of
introduction and authority.
But a British sailor having seen him do so dove into the sea and
caught hold of
the trunk before it sank. Once the British realized who he was and
what his
mission was, they sent him to England, where he was imprisoned for
several years
in the Tower of London.
By coincidence,
Lord Cornwallis was the hereditary constable/commander of the
Tower of London. When
Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Washington arranged that the
terms of the surrender
be dictated by Colonel Laurens, the son of Henry Laurens. So the
commander of the
Tower of London was forced to accept terms dictated by the son of
a man held prisoner
there.
Meanwhile, general devastation, destruction, and
murder took
place outside the realm of the well-known battles. New Bedford,
Massachusetts,
Fairfield, Connecticut, and countless other defenseless towns up
and down the
coast were attacked and destroyed by the British, in actions that
generally go
unmentioned in history books, remembered only on plaques in those
little towns and
sometimes by local tourist guides.
Mercy made it
clear that this war impoverished and greatly disrupted the lives
of nearly
everyone, not just the soldiers. The drama didn't end when the
last shot was fired.
She emphasized the economic side of the devastation, the
hyperinflation with soldiers
and suppliers paid in paper money that then became worthless; and
the ruthless
activities of speculators, buying up promissory notes for
practically nothing
from patriots and then demanding and getting payment from
Congress. It isn't a
pretty picture. The brave, cold, hungry, sick soldiers mutinied
more than once.
Some were executed. Everyone didn't live happily ever after. But
the Republic
survived, stumbled forward, and tried to find the true path to a
destiny that
could change the world forever.
Our Oriental Heritage, 1935
The Life of Greece, 1939
Caesar and Christ, 1944
The Age of Faith, 1950
The Renaissance, 1953
The Reformation, 1957
The Age of Reason Begins. 1961
The Age of Louis XIV, 1963
The Age of Voltaire. 1965
Rousseau and Revolution. 1967
The Age of Napoleon, 1975
As the title
says, Will and Ariel Durant tell a story − one whopping big story,
from the beginnings
of civilization up to the 19th century. This is not academic
history. It is
entertainment and information for the millions. There's no need to
read it from
the beginning: if you try to you'll almost certainly get bogged
down and never
finish. But you can read a chapter here and a chapter there,
following the storyline
threads that weave in and out from volume to volume or following
your current
interests. I got into him trying to read up on the background for
Dumas' Three
Musketeers.
The Durants tell
this story from a point of view. That is natural with history,
though academic-style
histories often mask their bias. Durant doesn't pretend to be
objective. He calls
it as he sees it, with strong and well-expressed opinions. For me,
much of the
charm and delight of the work comes from those opinions and that
excellent writing
style. Gibbon, too, was very subjective, with a delightful style,
and judgements
that sum up individuals, countries and periods quite well. But
Gibbon only
dealt with a small subset of the vast topic that Durant took on.
Sometimes Durant sums up a long complex career
with a few
incisive sentences. For instance, "Charles V was the most
impressive
failure of his age, and even his virtues were sometimes
unfortunate for mankind."
Reformation, p. 642. Also, about Christian II of Denmark,
"Christian
fled to Flanders with his queen, the Protestant sister of Charles
V; he made
his peace with the Church, hoping to get a kingdom for a Mass; he
was captured
in a futile attempt to regain his throne, and for twenty-seven
years he lived in
the dungeons of Sonderborg with no companion but a half-wit
Norwegian dwarf.
The paths of glory led him with leisurely ignominy to the grave
(1559)." Reformation,
p. 628. There's much here to ignite the imagination of a novelist.
Sometimes the Durants succeed in capturing in just
a few words
the crux of a situation, for instance about Loyola, in his days as
a soldier in
Pamplona, "Four years he spent there, dreaming of glory and waking
to routine."
Reformation, p. 906.
Elsewhere,
they render cursory and eloquent judgement, for instance, about
John Calvin Reformation
p. 490, "... we shall always find it hard to love the man who
darkened the
human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God
in all the long
and honored history of nonsense."
The books in this
series were published over the course of 40 years 1935-1975, and
some of the 11
volumes are over 1000 pages long. But this massive work has found
its way into
the hands of many people over the years, mainly as a perenniel
new-member enticement
for the Book-of-the-Month Club. That's how I got the first
volumes, back in 1959.
For many middle-class, baby-boomer Americans, these books were and
remain the
standard historical reference work.
But reading
Durant today, I can't help but recognize how much has changed,
with the dissolution
of the Soviet empire and the collapse of Communism. It is only
natural to tell
a story from the perspective of today. Now today
has changed,
so the story feels dated. The Story of Civilization
is still
great entertainment, and a handy reference work for checking dates
and names,
but the overall thrust of the narrative no longer resounds with
authority.
For the Durants,
the events of previous centuries were important as causes or
harbingers of what
in their day looked like the ultimate conflict facing mankind.
They highlighted
every minor event and character with any possible connection to
the historical
development toward Communism and Capitalism. While the narrative
ended with
Napoleon, the implication was that the story led inevitably to the
Cold War
issues and conflicts that were the background, the context in
which the Durants
wrote. But today, the Cold War is a distant era, which we can only
understand
with research and effort − trying to reconstruct a perspective and
a set of assumptions
that permeated much of Western thinking for a generation, but that
is now gone.
Today, there
is no ultimate conflict. Hence we no longer see history in
hegelian terms, with
events unfolding in a single direction. We can now appreciate
history as story,
as the story of mankind, and it can come alive again − in many
different tellings
of many different episodes. I wonder what interesting and obscure
events and
people will now be resurrected from the junkheap of history.
Today, we can
look back on the 20th century as a play in three acts − WW I, WW II, and Cold
War −
with a beginning, a middle
and an end − rather than as the culmination of all history. Only
when the Ice
Age ended could anyone conceive that ice was not the ultimate
state of nature,
that there would be other trends and cycles − some short and some
enormously
long.
Before the end
of the Cold War, reading history was like reading a story when you
already knew
the outcome. Yes, you could appreciate the details and the
performance, but it
all led to what you already knew. That was history seen through
the colored
lenses of the day's major issues.
What a relief
it is to live now in a time when the major issues are unknown and
unresolved − after
one orthodoxy has collapsed and before the formation of a new one.
Today, we
have the opportunity to look at the past with fresh eyes, with new
undefined and
shifting filters. The past is alive − not yet killed by a new
orthodoxy.
In other words,
Durant wrote this history at a time when it looked like the
conflict between
Communism and Capitalism was the culmination of the history in the
western world.
This perspective was part of the filter used to select of what to
tell about
and how to tell it.
We see
the world from
the perspective of the times we have live through. Today's notions
of the significance
of events may differ from what was common in Durant's day −
because the world
has changed since then.
History changes
over time. We always view the past teleogically, as if what came
before is of significance
mainly in so far as it led to the world becoming the way we see it
today. As
the present changes, the teleology changes. Hence the need for
each generation
to rewrite history in terms that make sense for it.
I read selections
from Herodotus back in high school. So I thought I knew what his
book − the
world's first history book − was about. Then in reading and seeing
The English
Patient, with its many references to and quotes from Herodotus, I
realized there
was much that I had missed.
Finally reading
the book from cover to cover, I discovered that the story that I
thought was the
main point − the invasions of Greece by Darius and Xerxes − takes
up a very
small part, at the end. Yes, that part is undeniably history,
with dramatic
scenes and quotable quotes. But most of Herodotus is anecdotal
anthropology and
travelogue and a delightful collection of rumors and traditions.
The heart of
the book isn't the history, it's the digressions. That's where you
get the flavor
of the times, a sense of what it might have been like to live in
the fifth century
B.C.
Eye openers:
The physical territory
of Greece was but a small part of the Greek world, long before
Alexander conquered
and hellenized. Considering how slow and difficult transportation
was, the cosmopolitan
nature of that Mediterranean world is remarkable. You see Greeks
and Greek
influence in Egypt, and Egyptian influence in Greece. In fact,
it's difficult
to say where one culture ends and another begins. There was little
correlation between
political boundaries and cultural boundaries.
The Greeks are
portrayed as a semi-nomadic people, frequently taking to their
ships en masse,
abandoning one territory/city and going off to conquer and settle
territory elsewhere
else. They were like hermit crabs, shedding one shell and then
taking over another.
There were Greek settlements all along the coasts of Africa,
Italy, and Spain,
and on almost every island − not just in the Aegean and Ionian
Seas, but also Sicily,
Sardinia, and Corsica.
The oracles,
particularly the oracle at Delphi, played a key role in
determining when, where,
and how populations moved. Anyone contemplating colonization
consulted the oracles,
and anyone involved in a territorial dispute brought on by
colonization consulted
the oracles as well. Greek peoples were constantly at war with one
another and
shifted alliances for the flimsiest of reasons − whether because
of a bribe or
because of a cultural insult, with obscure precedents in the
distant, legendary
past. But all trusted and respected the same oracles and feared
the wrath of
gods should they desecrate temples or holy places, regardless of
whether it was
a god that they themselves held in high esteem.
Some religious/cultural
traditions were narrowly local and others were held in common. The
Spartans,
for instance, were repeatedly constrained from participating in
key events
because of local festivals/ceremonies which made little sense to
other Greeks. For
instance, they diidn't send troops to battle Darius' army at
Marathon, despite
the urgent pleas of the Athenians. But all respected the tradition
of the Olympics
− even with Xerxes horde advancing on them.
The Persians were not so totally foreign to the
Greeks as the
Darius/Xerxes passages in Herodotus would lead one to believe.
There were many
Greeks at the Persian court. Many Greek colonies and mainland
cities were Persian
allies, or simply considered the Persians as another player in
their local deadly
games of coup and conquest and colonization. It was not just a
matter of right and
wrong, democracy against the evil empire. The Persians invaded at
the prompting
and request of Greeks who wanted their help to advance their own
personal
ambitions. And even Athens seriously considered switching sides
and allying
with the Persians.
The Greeks often
colonized voluntarily. A dissident faction would, with the full
support of the
local political leaders, gather people, ships, and supplies and go
off to
conquer or found a city somewhere else. Or facing the threat of
conquest, an
entire city might take to its ships and sail off over the horizon
with only the
scantiest notion of its destination, and create a new settlement
at the first
likely looking landfall.
Peoples conquered
by the Persians were often forced to colonize. Darius would take
soldiers captured
in war or the entire populations of conquered cities and resettle
them on lands
hundreds of miles away. He would give the leaders of his conquered
enemies estates
and wealth in Persian territory, and he would resettle some of his
own subjects
on the newly conquered land. This approach and the Greek voluntary
colonization
led to a continuous cultural churning and cross-fertilization. I
had thought of
the ancient world, with its limitations of transportation, as
consisting largely
of isolated parochial communities − like rural mountain towns in
19th century
America. Instead it was a vast mixing bowl − churning and churning
again.
There were
enormous cultural differences that persisted despite this
churning. The
traditions and beliefs with regard to marriage/sex and
religion/death differed
as widely from one city or small country to the next, as they did
from island to
island in the South Pacific in the 1920s. And on the fringes of
the civilized
world, where there was less churn, and about which far less was
known first-hand,
the differences were much greater and some of the common practices
were much more
brutal by today's standards. In particular, I was interested to
read of a nation
where the women as well as the men were warriors and a woman had
to kill a man
in battle before she had the right to marry.
When I think
of the Mediterranean world in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, the
only woman's
name that comes to mind is Aspasia − the brilliant courtesan, who
inspired
Plato and others. I was surprised to read in Herodotus about
Artemisia − ruler
of a small nation allied with Xerxes. Apparently, the Greeks were
scandalized
to see a woman as a warrior/ruler, despite their legends of
Amazons. But Artemisia
was one of the most effective generals in Xerxes' vast army.
The most popular
plays of Plautus and Terence focus on the role of slaves. In Prisoners
of War
by Plautus, the prisoners face a moral dilemma: because they were
captured, they
are now slaves, and it would be cheating to try to escape rather
than to wait
to be ransomed/bought back by their families. In The Rope by
Plautus, the
beautiful young girl that the hero is in love with is a slave, and
he seeks to
buy her from her owner. It then turns out that she had been born
free but was
kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery.
In The Brothers
and Phormio by Terence, once again the love interest
centers around slave
girls, and the challenge is not that of winning hearts but rather
bargaining with
the procurers who own them.
While Plautus
and Terence both borrowed their plots from Greek sources, they
modified them in
accordance with Roman slavery laws, and legal niceties are often
key to the resolution.
So, from the context of the plays, what are those
laws?
Slaves can
have, earn, and save money. If they save enough, they can buy
their own freedom.
The procedure for an owner freeing a slave is simple and informal.
You tap the
slave with your hand, turn him around, and say "Be free,
henceforth."
But in addition to paying their master, they also have to pay a
substantial tax
to the Roman government to legalize the transaction.
Slaves can be
trusted advisors, teachers, and companions of their owners, but
they cannot
plead a case. and their testimony is inadmissible in a court of
law.
There is no
obvious physical difference between slaves and freedmen. It's not
a matter of
race or even nationality. And record-keeping is sloppy, making it
easy to
kidnap children and sell them as slaves in other cities.
Prisoners of
war become slaves. People in debt can sell themselves into slavery
to pay off the
debt. Criminals may be enslaved as punishment. And the children of
slaves are slaves.
However one becomes a slave, once one is a slave,
one is treated
as property that can be bought and sold and that is totally at the
mercy of the
owner. Owners can do whatever they please with their slaves,
including hiring
them out as prostitutes. And there's no sense that there's
anything morally
wrong with the owners who act as procurers or the slaves who do
their bidding.
Prosperous young men who enjoy the services of slave girls
sometimes fall in
love with them and then seek to buy them from their owners. And
stories
recounting that are tales of sweet innocent love. Otherwise, these
young men
would marry as arranged by their parents − a financial
transaction, with the bride's
family paying a dowry. Buying a prostitute slave is portrayed as
more romantic
than an arranged marriage. And in the comic resolution, it may
turn out that the
slave girl is actually from a good family, having been kidnapped
as a child,
and that she's exactly the one that the parents would have wanted
him to marry
anyway.
Owners administer
whatever punishment they please on their slaves; and the slaves
have no recourse
to the law, where their testimony is inadmissible. An owner can
even execute a
slave and need not have a reason for doing so.
But, surprisingly,
slaves are shown as, for the most part, loyal to their masters.
They typically accept
this is their fate and their role, and they have no right to
dispute it. They are
bound by a code of honor; and except in the case when they have
recently been
made slaves by capture in war and have not yet gotten used to the
idea, they
don't seem inclined to try to escape, though little seems to be
done to prevent
them from doing so. Rather they focus their efforts on convincing
their owners
to free them or on trying to earn the money needed to buy their
own freedom.
By the time of
Petronius, the Republic is dead and many of its institutions have
changed. But
slavery remains and, in fact, seems even more important to society
than it was
before.
In the Satyricon, Trimalchio, the nouveau riche
party-giver, is
a former slave, as are many of his wealthy guests. One such guest
came from the
provinces and voluntarily sold himself into slavery, not because
of debt, but
because he knew that the prospects for advancement as a slave in
Rome were far
better than as an ordinary taxpayer in the provinces.
The world is in
constant flux, and slavery is a transitional state. Ambitious
slaves need to be
prudent − to not anger their owners and bring on punishment, to
save the allowance
they are paid, and to earn additional money, so they can quickly
accumulate enough
to buy their freedom and pay the manumission tax. Once freed, they
can rise socially
as their wealth increases.
The
conspicuous consumption of these wealthy former slaves is part of
their world view
− fortune is arbitrary, unstable, and as unpredictable as the acts
of a despot
like Tiberias, Caligula, or Nero. With no belief in gods or moral
rules, it makes
sense to play the game was well as you can play it. If you happen
to be on top
today, then eat, drink, and be merry. As for what happens after
death, you just
hope that it will be a continuation of this same kind of life,
with the same kind
of pleasures.
It's easy-come-easy-go
both in terms of money and of life. Those who happen to do well
today enjoy watching
gladiatorial battles and staged wars fought to the death. Perhaps
the pleasure
of watching people suffer and die in the arena comes in part from
the relief of
knowing that, for today at least, it's not they themselves who are
suffering and
dying − for only chance separates them from the victims.
Traumatic
events can change how an entire generation views the world,
leaving a strong
imprint long after. Such events can overturn previous assumptions
and create new
assumptions that get in the way of our recogniziing and adapting
to later changes.
For instance,
we came out of World War II with assumptions that 1) there are
just wars; that good
and evil are real and identifiable on a large scale, 2) people in
crowds tend
to act irrationally, more like animals than human beings, and 3)
technological
progress and hence economic progress is inevitable and
predictable.
Then we came out
of the Viet Nam War with a different set of assumptons. 1) Good
and evil are interconneccted,
and there are no just wars, 2) resources are becoming scarce, and
techological
progress is an illusion, that every step forward comes at
a high price.
We persist in
seeing the world from the perspective of the crisis that marked
our youth. And
we remain on the alert for a recurrence of a similar event. We are
always preparing
to fight the battles of the last war and hence set ourselves up to
be surprsed
by the next generation-defining event, which inevitably will be
diifferent from
the last one.
If you could
travel to ancient times, but bring nothing with you but your
knowledge, what
that you know would be likely to make the biggest difference? Of
course, if you
remembered specific historical information, like who won what
battles or even
who won what events at what Olympics, you could make a fortune
investing or betting.
But what about technological knowledge?
What you know
about computers would be useless, as would anything that depends
on internal combustion
or electricity.
In A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a blacksmith from 1850 could
do interesting
things in King Arthur’s Court, because the advances in technology
that the Yankee
takes advantage of could easily be transferred from the one time
to the other.
But the average person from today would be helpless in such a time
shift because
we depend so much on today’s complex infrastructure.
But what about
sail boats?
At the time of
the Trojan War, the Greek forces were stuck for months at Aulis
because the
wind was blowing in the wrong direction, and their fixed-sail
boats could only
proceed under oar, which was not practical for long distances. At
the height of
the Roman Empire, the food supply for Rome depended on grain
shipments from Egypt.
And the prevailing winds in the Mediterranean made it so
fixed-sail ships could
only transport that grain for six months of the year. And in
crucial sea
battles, like Actium, the direction of the wind made a decisive
difference.
A simple little
sailboat, like the ones I see on the Charles River, maneuvering
every which way
regardless of the direction of the wind, could have revolutionized
travel,
commerce, and war in ancient times.
Learn how to make
such a sailboat from scratch, and you’ll be ready when the next
twist in the fabric
of time takes you to ancient Greece or Rome.
But this theory
is belied by the felucca, a traditional sailboat with a single
easily maneuverable
sail. Feluccas are common today on the Nile, and they date back to
ancient times.
Today's feluccas are designed for sailing in shallow water. They
don't have a
keel but rather a centre plate that can be raised over sandbars.
It's hard to imagine
why in ancient times no one built sea-going vessels based on a
similar design. That's
as puzzling as the Aztecs making toys with wheels but not building
wagons and carriages
and wheelbarrows to do real work.
Is it possible
to accurately extrapolate from the shapes of letters
characteristics of the culture
that used those letters? Such an endeavor seems similar to
archaeologists extrapolating
a complete creature from a tooth or a fragment of bone.
The Hebrew
alphabet evolved over centuries. The following speculations are
based on the version
of the alphabet used to record the Torah −
first five books of the Bible.
1. None of the
letters resemble shapes found in nature. Some other ancient
written languages such
as Chinese and Egyptian evolved from pictograms (stylized drawings
that stood
for complete words). The Hebrew alphabet appears to have been
phonetic in its origins.
This seems natural for a culture that considered it religiously
unacceptable to
represent people and animals in statuary or paintings, there being
a fine line
between a graven image which is an object of worship and
an artistic
rendering for aesthetic appreciation.
2. Hebrew did
not include vowels. The reader needed to determine which vowel to
insert in order
to pronounce a word aloud. The letters were both phonetic and
mnemonic. They
were meant to help the initiated to remember and recite long
texts. A purely
phonetic alphabet − with both consonants and vowels − could
readily be used to
represent contemporary speech and could be read by many people. An
alphabet without
vowels makes it difficult to represent newly coined words, and
also makes it difficult
for the general public to learn to read. This alphabet was not
meant for the
masses. Rather it was the preserve of a special class of scholars,
whose main
intent was to read and interpret the sacred texts and to recite
them for the
public.
3. One would expect
a written language to evolve from short lists, inventories, ritual
formulas, and
prayers to longer compositions. The Hebrew written language
appears to have been
created to preserve a large pre-existing text − the Torah. In
other words, I
speculate that the Torah came first and the alphabet second; that
the alphabet
was created to preserve the sacred text, which otherwise would
have been subject
to corruption as an oral tradition.
4. A written
language intended for scrolls rather than monuments is appropriate
for a nomadic
people.
5. A complex
set of religious commandments helps to define and set apart one
nomadic people
from neighboring nomadic peoples, who are racially identical. In
other words,
the Torah helped define the Hebrew people.
6. Kings,
pharaohs, and emperors create their own laws and publish them to
make them known
and obeyed; and in ancient times publication meant display in
public places, the
most significant matters being engraved in stone. Such rulers
could change
those laws when and how they wished. Hebrew law was voluminous and
complex,
only read and understood by a special class of scholars. The laws
were subject
to debate and interpretation but the underlying texts never
changed.
When we see
history repeat itself disastrously within the same culture, we
presume that people
failed to learn from the lessons of the past. And when we see
similar disastrous
events unfold in a different cultures, we look for contacts
between the cultures,
as if the penchant for mass self-destructive behavior were a
contagious
disease; and if there had been no contact, the copycat events
would not have occurred.
But sometimes
similar outlandish and awful events occur independently, in
cultures that had no
prior contact. Analysis of such incidents might reveal universal
principles of
human nature − not commonality of dreams and neuroses due to the
collective
unconscious, but rather predictable rules of human behavior that
could and
should guide international relations and public policy.
One such
constellation of horrendous events occurred during the late 19th
century, in
South Africa, the Sudan, the American West, and China. The Zulus
in the
Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the rebel forces of the Mahdi in
1881-1882, the Ghost
Dancers 1888-1892, and the Boxers in 1897-1901 were all native
peoples who rose
up against far more powerful and technologically advanced
foreigners. The native
culture was about to be obliterated economically as well as
militarily. Their traditional
way of life was no longer viable. Everything they had believed in
was being disproved
daily in their interactions with the foreigners, who were already
in control.
The situation was hopeless. Then spontaneously, in all four
unconnected instances,
mobs of natives, with or without leaders, attacked the foreigners,
believing
that supernatural salvation was imminent and that by ritual and
magic they could
make themselves invulnerable to the bullets of the foreigners.
The letter began:
"Dear Sir,
Although I know you only from good references of your honesty, my
sad situation
compels me to reveal to you an important affair in which you can
procure a modest
fortune, saving at the same time that of my darling daughter."
Dated April 3,
1914, the letter was apparently sent by one Serge Solovieff, an
embezzler and murderer
in prison in Spain, to my great-uncle Charles Seltzer, who was in
his late 20s
at that time, living in Philadelphia, and just starting his career
as an
architect.
I found the
letter and a related newspaper clipping in a box of my great-uncle
Charlie's'
belongings when he died back in 1970. I was intrigued by the
mystery implied by
the words.
The clipping said that Solovieff, a banker in St.
Petersburg,
had embezzled over five million rubles, murdered a compatriot in
Spain, been apprehended
in London and extradited to Spain. The money was still missing.
There was no date
on the clipping, but the item on the reverse side was a review of
an issue of
the London Quarterly dealing with the centenary of Tennyson's
birth in 1909. It
is hard to imagine reviewing a magazine long after it was
published, but the letter
was dated 1914 − five years later.
Why would anyone
keep a clipping from an English newspaper for five years in a
prison in Spain,
and then send it to a total stranger in the U.S., with a letter
asking for help?
Was this a hoax that someone tried to play on my great-uncle? What
was there to
gain?
There are
several different ways that the surname could be transliterated
from the Cyrillic
alphabet: Solovieff, Soloviev, and Solovyov are all the same name,
the equivalent
of Mr. Nightingale. There was a famous Russian philosopher
Vladimir Solovyov,
who died around 1900 and who wrote some interesting and
provocative fiction and
poetry. He had a nephew named Sergei who was also a poet and who
was alive at
the time these letters were written. But that Sergei Solovyov was
not a banker
and did not end up in jail in Spain. Back then, before the
Internet, my research
was limited to what I could find in newspapers that had been
preserved in microfilm.
I soon reached a dead end.
Thirty years
later, when the Internet was available, I included the text of the
letter and
of the clipping in an article which I posted at my Web site − then
samizdat.com, now seltzerbooks.com.
The page got included in search engine indexes and people looking
for the name
Serge Solovieff or phrases in the letter or in the clipping found
my page and
contacted me. This is a random research technique that I call flypaper
−
posting content on the Web so people with similar interests will
find you and bring
you the information you need, when there is no way that you could
actively find
the information yourself.
As a result of
that posting, I was contacted by half a dozen people who possess
identical or
nearly identical letters and clippings that were addressed to
their relatives
just before or during World War I. And one of them has a second
letter as well.
Her great-uncle took the bait and sent a cable to Spain back in
1913, and received
back an 11-page letter, a masterpiece of persuasive deception,
with complete
details on how to get to Spain and what to do there to retrieve a
fortune.
I told this story
to an old friend, Ashley Grayson, and he let me know that
variations on this
scam, popularly known as The Spanish Prisoner have been
around for a long
time. He pointed me to the movie The Spanish Prisoner,
written by David
Mamet and starring Campbell Scott, Ben Gazzara, and Steve Martin.
That movie,
which portrays an elaborate confidence game, includes the
following passage,
which is the source of its title: "It's an interesting setup, Mr.
Ross. It's
the oldest confidence game on the books. The Spanish Prisoner...
Fellow says, he
and his sister, wealthy refugees, left a fortune in the Home
Country. He got
out. The girl and the money are stuck in Spain. Here is her
beautiful portrait.
And he needs money to get her and the fortune out. Man who
supplies the money gets
the fortune and the girl. Oldest con in the world."
Ashley also noted that this scam is a relative of
the
Nigerian letter, an Internet-based scam. I receive an
average of 2 variants
of the Nigerian letter every day. My email inbox seems to be a
magnet for such
messages. There's a detailed explanation at http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/
In brief:
"The Scam
operates as follows: the target receives an unsolicited fax,
email, or letter
concerning Nigeria containing either a money laundering or other
illegal proposal
or you may receive a Legal and Legitimate business proposal by
normal means. The
common variations on the Scam include 'overinvoiced' or 'double
invoiced' oil or
other supply and service contracts where your Bad Guys want to get
the overage
out of Nigeria; crude oil and other commodity deals; a 'bequest'
left you in a
will; and 'money cleaning' where your Bad Guy has a lot of
currency that needs
to be 'chemically cleaned' before it can be used, and he needs the
cost of the
chemicals. Or the victim will just be stiffed on a legitimate
goods or services
contract... the variations are very creative and virtually
endless."
I have six
instances, with almost identical introductory articles and
clippings but with different
handwriting on all of them and with two different names for the
sender. These
letters range in dates from 1911 to 1914. They are sent to
individuals from Maryland
to Washington State, who apparently had nothing in common and
apparently had no
previous connections with Spain. I have no clues as to how the
victims were
chosen or how the senders got their addresses.
My best guess
is that hundreds, if not thousands of these letters were sent to
random
recipients, like modern email spam, and that enough of these
recipients took the
bait to make this a profitable venture − one to be tried again and
again and to
be passed along from one schemer to another. Impediments to
trans-Atlantic
travel brought on by World War I may have brought it to an end. In
any case, it's
probable that the perpetrators were never caught.
I wouldn't be
surprised if there were similar scams in Roman times. The vendors
outside the
Colloseum in Rome today are probably very much like the vendors
who preyed on
tourists at the same spot 2000 years ago. And there were probably
sketch
artists at the Pyramids in ancient times drawing pictures of
tourists on camelback
just as their descendants do with cameras today. To me the
commonality and
continuity of human vulnerability to scammers and peddlers is
reassuring − it
reinforces feelings of community with humanity through the ages.
When you are
tired and frustrated and you know that the hassles you are going
through are unnecessary,
instead of venting or steaming, come up with a solution. Every
hassle you face is
a million-dollar business opportunity.
Have you ever
been sitting on a toilet in an airplane bathroom when the captain
says turbulence
is coming and everybody should fasten their seatbelts? Have you
ever seen a
seatbelt in an airplane bathroom? Why not? What are the possible
issues and how
would you deal with them?
Have you ever at
a baggage carousel in an airport realized that your suitcase has
been going round
and round, and you could have left long ago if you had quickly
identified it? I
used to have a similar problem in large parking garages,
forgettiing where I
had left my car and walking up and down hoping to spot it. Now
that problem is
solved with a button on my electronic key that triggers a beeping
noise from my
car. Why not do the same for a suitcase, generating a distinctive
sound, perhaps
even saying my name?
Have you ever
been embarrassed overhearing personal matters being discussed or
unseemly language
being used at a nearby table? Or have you ever wanted to have a
private conversation,
not be overheard by restaurant neighbors? When you are at home,
you might use a
white-noise generator to masks sounds from your neighbor's
apartment, or to mask
the sounds from your own apartment so your neighbors don't hear
them. Why not have
a white-noise generator at every table of a restaurant or have
such generators
available for diners at a nominal rental cost?
People who
wear electronic hearing aids have the option of turning down the
volume or turning
them off to avoid having to hear noises or words they'd prefer not
to hear, or
so they can read and concentrate without distractions. People with
normal
hearing, can dampen sound with earplugs. But it's easy to imagine
silence aids
− electronic devices as small and unobrusive as hearing aids that
block or negate
sound, far more effectively than earplugs.
People on house
arrest or awaiting trial or on probation often have to wear
electronic ankle
bracelets that trigger when the wearer goes outside the allowed
area. For greater
flexibility in the level of virtual imprisonment a court could
impose, why not
add to the ankle bracelet the ability to jam electronic signals,
to prevent the
wearer from using a cell phone or connecting to the Internet.
With heightened
risk of terrorist attacks, security checks at airports are taking
longer and longer.
Today, you have to remove everything from your pockets. You have
to remove your
coat, your belt, your shoes. Then you go through a full body scan.
And the ante
keeps going up.
Why not start a
low-cost, fast-check airline with all passengers travelling with
no baggage and
no clothes? Or have a special fast-check class of passengers who
leave their
clothes in the airport, wear disposable gowns on the plane, and
rent clothes at
the destination, preordered online.
Devices are now
available that reportedly do an excellent job of translating
spoken speech and generating
voice output, making it possible for people who speak different
languages to
converse naturally. With the current pace of technology
development similar
capability should soon be available as a smart phone app. Why not
develop an app
that supplements that capability by recognizng and interpreting
culture-dependent
body language?
Most people look
much better some times than other times. Under stress or when
self-conscious, their
facial muscles distort their faces. Some people go to great
lengths, with face
lifts and cosmetics, to improve their looks. But they could
probably get better
results with improved facial muscle tone and better control of
their facial muscles.
So why not develop an app that prompts the user to exercise facial
muscles and
learn how to consciously control them?
Sometimes
loading and unloading airline passengers takes 15-30 minutes, with
everyone
going in and out of one door. Large aircraft typically have a door
at the back
as well as the front, but only the front door gets connected to
the movable
passageway that leads to and from the terminal building. An
airport that allowed
two ways in and out instead of one would be able to cut
boarding/unboarding times,
pleasing time-conscious passengers and making it possible for the
airport to
handle more flights with the same facilities.
Graffiti is
everywhere. Removing it or painting over it is a significant
expense. And as soon
as you get rid of it, it's replaced by more. I could imagine
corporations hiring
graffiti artists to embed corporate logos in their designs and to
police their
own work to make sure the logos stay in tact.
Typically, at
a Chinese or Japanese restaurant you are given chop sticks to eat
your rice and
your main course, and a plastic spoon for your soup. Why not make
hollow chop sticks
that can double as straws?
Imagine a
parking meter that is also a charging station for electric cars.
While you are
parked, your car recharges. You pay for parking and also pay for
the power. Parking
garages could also use such devices. The availabliity of such
facilities would make
it much more convenient to use electric cars. You could recharge
in many places
instead of a few.
In double-blind studies, where both groups believe they are
receiving an experimental
medication but one group is not, the group receiving the harmless
substance
typically shows measurable improvement, sometimes almost as much
improvement as
the people getting the real thing. Apparently, if we think we'll
get better, we
get better, or at least the symptoms subside. So why not sell a placebo
pill?
Label it and advertse it making no clams that it is real medicine.
Clearly indicate
that this will not cure anything. But explain that it may provide
fast relief
for symptoms if you believe that it will give you relief.
Have you ever
been late for work because the noise of your air conditioner
masked the sound of
your alarm clock? Why not build alarm clock features into air
conditioners? When
the designated time arrives, the air conditioner shuts off and an
alarm sounds?
Car recalls
are often ineffective because people with used cars never hear
about them and
people who do hear about them ignore them, even when safety is
involved. The
solution seems obvious. Most states require annual car
inspections. Why not feed
the recall data into the state inspection systems. Then when you
go to get a new
inspection sticker, you would get information about recalls
related to your
vehicle and the inspectors could check to see if recall fixes have
been done. Also,
the states and/or the federal government could mandate that
certain safety-related
changes must be made for a car to pass inspection.
Obituary notices
are almost always printed in hard-to-read type, smaller than
anything else in
the newspaper. Considering that the elderly, many of who have
failing eyesight,
frequently consult that part of the paper, that policy seems
inconsiderate,
even brutal. Newpapers could and should print death notices in
larger type than
the rest of the paper to make the information accessible by those
who most need
and want to read them.
In areas where
snow emergencies are common, car rental companes are missing a
major marketing
opportunity. When customers rent cars in such an area in the
winter, they should
each receive a winter emergency package including:
1) details on where in this
particular car you can find windshield wipers, defrosters, and
anything else
that might be useful in those circumstances
2) a windshield scraper
3) instructions on how to return
the car after hours, in case of a snow emergency
4) a number to call if you
drop off your car after hours due to a weather emergency so you
can get a ride
home from someone from the rental office
5) a refund plan to give
customers credit if a rental is cut short by bad weather and/or an
option to
keep the car for an extra day or more, however long the official
snow emergency
lasts, at no extra cost so they can finish what they were doing
and return the car
when it is safe to drive.
I’m being bombarded
with messages about my 50th college reunion. It strikes me as
strange that
reunions and continuing communication with alums are tied to the
year of graduation.
When I think of my school experiences, I think more of people in
the class
before and the class after, as well as people who never graduated.
I think of people
who were in the same major, or who took some of the same courses,
or who were
involved in some of the same activities. There are very few people
from my class
that I have any desire to see again, but there are many other
people who were
around when I was there who I would like to get back in touch
with.
High schools
and colleges should organize their communications and reunions in
terms of schoolmates
rather than classmates − people who attended school at the same
time, rather
than people in a single class.
Takis, a Greek
immigrant, owned a Shell franchise in West Roxbury. Before I met
him, I never
paid attention to where I bought gas or who sold it to me. It was
a commodity,
and the people who did the pumping or handled the cash register
were faceless. You
might feel loyalty to a church or to an Elks Club, but one gas
station was the
same as another.
During the oil
boycott of 1973, gas became scarce. When we needed gas, my wife
and I took
turns waiting in line for hours, and some times, despite the wait,
got nothing.
One day my wife got in line at Takis Shell, and the owner came out
and told
her, "You are a regular customer. You are special. We take care of
you."
We hadn't been regular customers before. But we were ever
after that,
benefiting from his special treatment during the boycott, and
going back to his
station and only his station for nearly 30 years.
When other gas
stations automated so customers could pay at the pump and never
see or talk to
anyone, Takis taped over the credit card slots so you had to walk
into his office
to do the transaction. He knew you by name, talked about himself
and his family
and asked about you and your family; and he followed up on
conversational
details from one time to the next. Some times his wife or his son
was behind the
cash register. You weren't just buying gas; you were touching base
with old friends.
While in the office, often you bought snacks or you asked for
advice about a strange
noise your car was making. And if your car needed fixing that was
where you took
it for repair. Although you could have spread your buying power
anonymously
among a dozen local gas stations, you concentrated all your
purchases there; and,
without even considering price, you felt you benefited from this
business relationship.
Going to this gas station was like going to the general store a
hundred years
ago − it was both social and business.
About 15 years
ago, Shell put Takis out of business. Apparently, Shell decided to
shut down franchises
and instead to sell through company-owned stations. A few days
before Takis
turned over ownership, a reporter from the local newspaper was
talking to him
in his office when I happened to walk in. Takis pointed to me as
an example of
a loyal customer. And talking to the reporter, I realized how much
I had learned
from Takis over the years and had put into practice in my
Web-based business.
In the short run, automation may save you time and money, but in
the long run
it could cost you dearly − making your operation the same as many
others, putting
you at the mercy of larger companies that sooner or later will
price you out of
business. It's well worth the time and trouble to talk to
customers, to get to
know them, to go out of your way for them. And if there's any kind
of a glitch
so you need to spend more time, that's an additional opportunity
to build a
relationship. The more what you have to sell is perceived as a
commodity, the
more important it is to build relationships with customers, to
give them good
reasons, both tangible and intangible for coming back for more.
Today's
company-owned station uses pay-at-the-pump automation. The air
pump, which used
to be free to all, is coin-operated. They do car washes, but
handle no repairs,
not even flat tires. I don't know the people who run it. I never
go there. It
looks like few people do. I miss Takis.
I can imagine
writing a science fiction story that includes a pain simulator.
In the story,
this device was developed for lesbian couples who were giving
birth, where the
non-pregnant partner wanted to share the experience of giving
birth. Later, the
product would have been adopted by heterosexual couples, to give
the husband an
opportunity to share the birth experience. Using this invention,
the partner would
feel the same kind of pain and the same intensity of pain, in the
same regions
of the body as the person who is feeling it naturally. The
simulator could also
serve as part of treatment for pain because the sympathy and
togetherness of
others helps ease the stress of someone in real pain.
Imagine bears
dolls dressed to look like grandparents. Such dolls would help
kids get used to
hugging and loving grandparents. It would be natural for
grandparents to
give such bears to their grandchildren; and for parents to give
them as well.
It would be natural to launch and promote such a product around
Grandparent Day
− September
13.
As a present
for my first grandchild, Adela, when she was two years old, I
assembled an alphabet
book, with pictures of family members, friends, toys, etc. The family
was
the extended family, as a reminder of cousins, aunts, and uncles
who she saw rarely
because they lived far away. The result was a time-capsule
keepsake, a snapshot
of the extended family of a point in time.
I used one picture
of one person per page and at least one page for each letter of
the alphabet.
But the number of pages per letter was unlimited, so no one was
left out
because a letter was taken.
The photos
were taken with a digital camera. I used Word to make the pages.
Starting with
a blank page, I would insert the picture, then drag at the corner
of the picture
to expand it to fill the available space. I typed the text at the
bottom of the
page in large type. I printed it in color on ordinary copy paper.
I put all the
pages in a 3-ring binder. But instead of punching holes in the
paper, I
inserted each into an Avery Sheet Protector −
see-through plastic containers the same size as the paper,
with 3 holes
in the plastic. That makes the pages more durable and less likely
to be ripped
out in the hands of a two-year-old.
Why does every
bank have to have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of branch
offices? From an
ATM, you can do business with many different banks. Some of those
ATMs are in
those branch offices. Others sit in public places and are run by
independent
companies. Why not change banking regulations to allow independent
agencies to
handle all manner of consumer banking services for many different
banks, obviating
the need for the wasteful multplication of single-bank branches.
Such agencies
could also provide value-added services that no one provides
today. Insurance
agencies handle transactions with a variety of different insurance
companies, and
because of their relationship with those companies and their
knowledge of their
offerings, those agencies can provide advice on which is the best
one for you
for each of your different insurance needs, and you can get X from
one and Y
from another and Z from yet another, but only have to deal with a
single agent.
Similarly,
banking agencies could make it easy for you to do different pieces
of your banking
with different banks, and yet have a single-point access all those
accounts, both
face-to-face with a human agent/teller, and also online.
In Boston,
when the John Hancock Tower was erected near the Prudential Tower,
as an unintended
consequence, wind patterns changed and high winds blew out heavy
windows from upper
stories of the Hancock.
With that in
mind, I wonder if it is possible to deliberately change wind
patterns and intensify
wind flow by building walls.
For instance, when
building an array of electricity-generating windmills in an open
field, why not
build walls to the side, beginning perpendicular to the prevailing
wind and angling
inward, funnel-like, creating wind-tunnel effects, intensifying
the wind and focusing
it on the blades of the windmills. Perhaps the walls could be
movable as well,
so they could be adjusted to maximize the effect of the wind
different times of
the year and of the day.
China, Japan,
India, and the US are all now racing to put men on the moon.
Unlike the first
time around, the objective appears to be to establish permanent
bases. That raises
the question of how well man can cope long-term in the Moon’s
reduced gravity. Man
evolved on Earth to live in Earth gravity. A long-term change in
gravity could lead
to serious problems related to bone mass, muscle tone, and the
function of
internal organs.
The Moon’s gravity
is about 1/6 that of Earth. So someone who weighs 180 lbs. on
Earth would weigh
just 30 lbs. on the Moon.
In science
fiction, the usual solution for weightlessness is magnetic boots
or having space
ships and space stations spin, so centripetal force can substitute
for gravity.
But those solutions would not make sense on the surface of the
Moon.
Perhaps a low-tech
workaround would work. Why not just add weight? For instance, a
180 lb. astronaut
could wear a suit weighing 900 lbs., bringing his/her total weight
to 1080 lbs.
in terms of Earth gravity, and 180 lbs. on the Moon.
The extra weight
need not be ballast, just useless dead weight. Rather it could
include oxygen, water,
and food; plus armor to protect against such hazards as tiny
meteors, high-speed
space debris, cosmic rays, etc.; and high-tech gear
that extends a person’s
capabilities.
Today’s cigarette
filters are on the receiving end — between the cigarette and the
mouth. But much
of the bad effects of smoking — to the smoker and to those around
— are from the
smoke, which comes out the other end.
So why not design
a filter for the smoking end? This could be a reusable plastic or
metal gadget you
put over the cigarette. It would allow air to enter so the tobacco
could burn. And
it would filter out harmful substances before releasing smoke to
the air. Such
a device could eliminate the odor of smoke as well. And it could
also shut down
after a period of inactivity, extinguishing the burning, as a way
to prevent fires.
If such
gadgets existed, it would make sense to allow people who use them
to smoke in public
places, since their use would eliminate the danger and even the
odor of second-hand
smoke.
In TV mystery
shows that focus on crime and forensic evidence, medical
examiners sometimes
exhume bodies to doublecheck the identity of the deceased; and
sometimes their
efforts at identificaton are stymied by the fact that the body was
cremated.
Why not
take a hair from everyone who dies, and securely store that hair
in case the need
ever arises to test the DNA? That’s a
non-invasive procedure — far less than embalming or
applying cosmetics
to the corpse. And it could obviate the need for costly and
emotion-wrenching
exhumation in the future.
As for privacy
concerns, the person is dead. And the DNA test is only performed
if ordered by
a judge when there is reasonable cause.
Objections? Perhaps
some would see this as a first step toward a national identity
system based on DNA
tests performed on newborns. But would that be bad?
We need to identify
and foster the development of individuals with talent for finding
unusual, yet
workable, solutions to practical problems.
I believe that psychologists
should use videogames to test intelligence. And rather than write
new videogames,
they should analyze current, popular games to determine the
correlation between
certain aspects of intelligence and performance levels in the
games. Today’s kids
are far more comfortable with playing these games than with
performing the
pencil-and-paper or face-to-face tests that were designed
generations ago as a way
to measure IQ. And games could be selected that recognize and
reward out-of-the-box
thinking.
Not that we
should abandon the old tests, but rather we should add these new
ways of measuring,
as a way to spot problems and identify talent that otherwise might
be overlooked.
There are medications
to help people with medical conditions that lead to sudden,
intense urinary
urges and leakage. But there does not seem to be anything
available for
ordinary people who find themsselves in unusual circumstances that
mke it
awkward, difficult, or impossible to urinate.
There is a
need for a pill that temporarily reduces the urge to urinate. Take
it before
going to a perforance or a movie theater. Take it before you
participate in a
sporting event.Take it when you might be caught for hours in a
traffic jam.
Tee shirt with cutouts for breasts,
meant as nightwear.
Also could be worn on top of a more or less revealing
brassiere.
I only knew these
people briefly and in a single aspect of their lives, but their
every action
seemed to indicate focus, intensity, consistency, and dedication.
They were proud
of what they did, and how they did it showed who they were.
The Machinist
Bob was
foreman at Econotool, a machine shop in the suburbs of
Philadelphia. I worked there
a couple of summers back when I was in college, more than 50 years
ago. They made
cutting tools which were resold by Black and Decker. They taught
me a few
simple repetitive tasks. I silver-soldered carbide blades to steel
shanks, keeping
a close watch on temperature and time. I also ground those carbide
blades on a
diamond wheel, using a rig designed to sharpen them at the
specified cutting
angle. It was easy to clamp the raw piece into position and grind
away. But it
was difficult to do this hundreds of times a day and give it your
full attention
− to not fall half-asleep with boredom and blunder disastrously.
Bob knew
everything there was to know about the machines I was working on
and all the
other machines in the plant. He could clean them and fix them.
Given a blueprint,
he could adjust them, set them up, and make rigs so they would
turn out quality
product repeatedly. If he didn't have a replacement part, he could
machine that
part from scrap metal; and he enjoyed such unexpected challenges.
This was blue
collar work, but he wore a white shirt − a brightly clean
shirt that he
wore proudly. He worked hard, but at the end of the day that shirt
was always
as clean as at the beginning. He worked with no waste movements,
no spills, no accidents
− all from unremitting dedication to what he did.
He reminded me
of a craftsman in the Middle Ages whose craft was his identity and
became his name,
like Cooper or Smith, who conscientiously devoted his full
attention to his work,
day after day. From the way he worked, you knew he believed that
what he did mattered,
that doing it well meant that his life mattered. Money was
secondary. His work
was his religion. He handled his tools and his machinery with the
respect and
pride of a priest serving mass.
The Postal Clerk
Jack, now retired,
was a clerk at the Post Office in West Roxbury, MA for 30 years.
He approached
his job with a level of seriousness and respect similar to the
foreman at Econotool.
He knew every postal regulation by word and in spirit. When a
question arose,
his fellow clerks turned first to him, not the book. When a
customer had a question
or misunderstood the options and was about to make a costly
decision, Jack
explained the rules and also the practical aspects of how the mail
is handled,
without talking down. You got a mini-lesson on the Postal Service
and also on
life, from someone who could have been a great teacher but who
took pride in
being a great postal clerk.
He didn't just
sell you stamps and make sure you had filled out the right
paperwork for
shipping packages overseas or for applying for passports. While
doing everything
that needed to be done as efficiently as it could be done, he
would smile and
give you a tidbit of information or advice for the future; and
he'd often set
in motion some of the many elaborate gadgets he had on display in
his work
area. These were liquid mind-mystifiers − turn them upside down
and bubbles
moved in random but beautiful patterns, confined but yet fee, and
demanding your
attention.
I hope that in
retirement he still finds ways to take pleasure and in and pride
from the
necessary details of life. I miss him.
Working in an
office, we have to deal with the expectations of bosses and
co-workers. Our social
and physical environments provide reminders of what needs to be
done and when to
do it.
Working at home,
alone, it's easy to procrastinate or to shuffle from one project
to another,
not making substantial progress on any of them. It sometimes takes
an effort to
motivate ourselves to get things done on time.
I use creative
procrastination to overcome that difficulty.
At any given
moment there are dozens of things that I could and should be
doing. I make a list
of them. I prioritize the items. I keep adding to that list.
Many times,
the task that is most important to work on is something I don't
want to do right
now. I'd rather do something else. So I work on that something
else.
It's also on the list, and I'll have to do it sooner later.
While doing
that something else, I keep remembering the task I put off
that I really
should be doing. That feeling of guilt generates energy,
motivating me to do the
other task faster and better.
Sometimes the high
priority task I'm avoiding is something that I can't put off any
longer. I need
to start it pronto or I won't be able to get it done on time and
that failure could
have serious consequences. In that case, I need to think of
another task that I
will eventuallly need to do and that is even more undesirable than
the high priority
one. I try to convince myself that that task is important and
urgent. The more
I think about the substitute task, the more the priority one
doesn't seem so
bad; and I get to work on the priority one to put off having to do
the substitute
task.
Over time, we
need to discover our natural rhythm, categorizing the things we
need to do on a
regular basis, and getting a feel for how often we get the urge to
do such
things. For instance, Web site updates, paying bills and keeping
track of finances,
cleaning the house or yard, and doing creative work. For me, the
cycle is about
a week. If I try to pay bills and balance my check book on a day
when I feel
like working on a creative project, that's like pushing rocks
uphill. Likewise,
working on a creative project when my mind would prefer the
relaxing tedium of
a repetitive task, is laborious and unproductive. So I try to do
the things I
need to do when it
feels natural
to do them, modulating that with creative procrastination, as
described above.
Once we find our
natural rhythm, we need to schedule, loosely. For instance, say my
rhythm is a
week or two and one of the chores is finances. In that case, I
would aim to deal
with finances on the same day every week and try to make that a
habit. But if the
right mood isn't there that day or something else comes up, I
don't worry about
it. Over the course of a week or two, I should be able to cover
what needs to
be covered, by just following my natural inclinations. And since
I'm doing this
work when I'm in the right frame of mind, I'm able to work faster
and better.
If there is some regularly recurring task that
needs to get
done but that I never have the urge to do it, even using creative
procrastination;
then I try to make adjustments so it's no longer necessary or else
hire someone
else to do it. I am who I am. Why fight it?
When I worked
alone at home for my ebook publishing company, I had no boss, no
colleagues. My
to-do list was growing out of control. Every day it got longer and
more daunting.
There was no way I could keep pace, much less catch up. The list
was intended as
a way for me to prioritize and get organized, but it became a
chore in and of
itself.
Then I shifted
from to-do
list to done
list, and that change made a big difference in my
state of mind and productivity.
My done
list recorded
what I actually did. Each day was on a separate page. I
categorized what I did
into four main areas: family, maintenance, business, and personal.
And each of
those categories had subcategories. For instance, maintenance
included health, food,
and house. Personal included writing, reading, languages, TV, and
other entertainment.
Before, time
seemed to disappear. The day would end and I would wonder how I
managed to waste
so much time. My focus would be on all the to-do list tasks that I
hadn’t gotten
to. With my done list, I looked
back and saw what I had accomplished and enjoyed. And the
categories gave me a
feel for what I actually did with my time, showing my patterns,
making sense
out of what seemed to be chaos.
Of course, I
still kept a tickler/reminder list and a short, manageable list of
things I planned
and expected to do that day. But the focus was on the done list.
It
felt good adding a new item to the done list.
While my circumstaces
are different now, I still keep a done list. And now I can
add writing
this lense to that list.
Step One - Get Moving
Do one small
thing a day that could eventually help you make your life a little
better. Don't
try to come up with a master plan. Don't try to make sense of
everything. Just focus
on small activities that will move you forward. At some point, it
might dawn on
you that these actions are taking you in a particular direction.
Then you may
make course corrections to advance more quickly. But first get
moving.
Step Two - Exer-Work
As you get older,
everything becomes harder and takes longer. You fight the slowing
of the body
with efforts of the mind to motivate and energize yourself, so you
can feel as
if you're making progress. But increasingly you need physical
exercise for health,
which leads to a time crunch − how can you spend an hour a day
walking or jogging
when there isn't enough time in the day to do what you want and
need to do?
To deal with
this problem, I categorized my typical activities as maintenance,
relaxation, exercise,
or progress, and kept track of when I did what. Then I gradually
modified my relaxation
and maintenance activities so they did double duty, as exercise or
progress. Remember,
God invented snow to shovel, grass
to cut, and leaves to rake so you would be motivated to exercise.
He also
created dogs so you'd have good reason to walk.
Writing is
part of who I am and what I do. So I begin working on a project
before going
out to exercise. Then ideas occur to me naturally as I walk or
jog. I bring
along a notebook. And instead of the exercise being a boring
chore, I enjoy it;
and by the time I get home, I'm anxious to start writing again.
Step Three - You Don't Need to Finish Everything
at Once
Today's computers
are digital. They are based on only two possibilities −
yes or no, on or
off. But people are by nature analog, with a continuous
range of possibilities.
For us, little changes matter because they accumulate and take us
where we want
to go a little bit at a time.
When I was young,
I looked for ways to save steps, to conserve energy. I sought the
most efficient
ways to do things so I could accomplish more. In middle age, I
went out of my
way to take more steps. I ran up and down stairs a for the
exercise, and I exercised
with no purpose other than to burn fat. Now in old age, once again
I try to save
steps, to conserve energy, seeking the most efficient ways to do
things.
What were the
implications of this changing perspective on public policy and the
environment
when baby boomers like me moved from young to middle age? And what
are the
implications now that we are in old age?
When I was four
years old, my parents gave me ten cents a week as an allowance,
and I could walk
to the corner drug store and buy what I wanted.
The big choice
back then was between tangible objects and ephemeral experiences.
If I bought
plastic cowboys and Indians, I could play with them over and over.
And if I
bought comic books, I could read them over and over. And in either
case I could
share or trade them with friends.
If instead, I
bought penny candy or ice cream, while the experience would be
delightful, it wouldn't
last. The act of enjoying it would destroy it. I would end up with
nothing.
Despite temptation, I almost never opted for candy
or ice cream.
When my kids
were young, I hoped that they would enjoy the toys and comic books
that I had enjoyed
at their age. But they showed little interest in the old stuff,
caught up as
they were in the new objects of popular culture that they and
their friends saw
advertised.
Now I value
experiences. The boxes of plastic cowboys and Indians and of comic
books just take
up space. They are a burden to me, and, after I go, they will be
considered
trash. At this stage of my life, I want to enjoy the moment rather
than
accumulate tangible goods. I value ephemeral beauty and ephemeral
pleasure, and
memories of such moments.
Visualize.
Go for a
walk.
Erase
all thoughts.
Then
imagine doing the task you are
procrastinating about, in all
its detail,
including preparation for it.
Build
momentum through
visualizing.
And when you get home, sit down and do it.
written from
1995 in West Roxbury, MA to May 202o in Milford, CT